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Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak (arstechnica.com)
230 points by rbanffy 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 643 comments



Please correct me where I'm mistaken.

* This password list has been public for a long time, and is easy to access: hidden excel column on a public spreadsheet.

* BIOS access means the intruder can change boot devices, boot their own OS, infect the BIOS with a virus, change boot devices back, compromise the vote host OS.

* Keycard security isn't tight security. Any amature physical penetration tester would just use a primitive attack on the door to get around it. E.g.: Grab the handle from under the door with a wire. Youtube has a ton of examples.

* This could have been done months ago, and over a long period of time.

* The intruder could clean up logs and any other traces of their actions.

Where am I technically wrong here? I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. It sounds like what you would do with BIOS passwords if you wanted to do something nasty. I haven't seen these questions addressed anywhere.

I hear some people say "but we use paper ballots". Then why do you have a BIOS password? If it's all paper where does the computer fit in? All of this is honest curiosity, I'm not sure how the voting system works.


>I hear some people say "but we use paper ballots". Then why do you have a BIOS password? If it's all paper where does the computer fit in? All of this is honest curiosity, I'm not sure how the voting system works.

Not sure about Colorado specifically, but in many jurisdictions voters mark paper ballots, which go into a machine to be tabulated, and are finally deposited into a box for safe keeping/future recounts.


I voted early in person in Colorado a few days ago. Use a machine to entry my votes. Votes were printed onto a piece of paper. I checked to make sure the marks on the paper matched what I entered into the machine and then dropped it into the ballot box (not a machine just a box that collected the ballots). It was pretty sane and didn't seem like there was a lot to worry over related to the electronic entry system.

As to how the votes on the ballots are tallied - if those machines are compromised seems like a definite problem -- though there is at least the option to hand count the ballots to compare against ...


In my locale there is a header on the physical ballot that contains a bunch of barcodes, presumably to make your votes machine readable. It then prints the votes in text below.

I absolutely hate that fact. I am a human, I cannot read barcodes without a computer. Therefore, I cannot tell if the important part of what was recorded is correct.

Not sure if Colorado's are the same...


I believe the idea is that random audits check whether the barcode matches the human-readable part, and in the extremely unlikely even problems are found they simply hand-recount _all_ the ballots ignoring the barcode.


Can you find any website or document that validates that these "random audits" are done? By whom and on what cadence? I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.


If you don't trust risk-limitjng audits, you're never gonna trust any voting system. Someone has to administer the system, do the counting, sum up the totals, etc.


Asking these kind of questions, and authorities being able to answer them clearly, is essential to build and maintain trust.


Colorado requires automatic risk-limiting audits on its election systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit


> I've not been able to find anything like this. Just hand-waving, assertions that "someone does something," and so on.

(Taking a bit more pointed tone than I usually would, because of the amount of misinformation around this general topic and because of annoyance at people putting less effort in than election workers, from secretaries of state down to volunteers, and casting shade from the laziness of their armchair. Thank you to all the people spending their time trying to secure elections!)

Did you try searching for "colorado voting audit"?

There's a page on their SOS site... https://coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/auditCenter.html

Which even has a YouTube video on the process... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKgSKh4utNo


The value of absolute transparency is why nothing will beat paper ballots written and marked in plain English counted by hand with anyone and everyone who cares about election integrity watching the process.


Absolutely agree. Just seems soooo simple.


And we should dye the thumb of those that already voted.


I’m not sure what problem that solves that crossing voters of a list doesn’t already solve. What about mail in and early voting?


It’s a fun way to add flare to voting day.


It’s only fun if you want people to know you voted. Not everyone does.


From a IS centric POV, are there communities where voting is looked down upon?


I was mostly thinking people in coercive relationships.

But in terms of communities it might be that voting is looked down upon for certain members of that community not the community as a whole.

In broader terms while marking people who have voted may not reveal who they voted for it does reveal that they did vote. This is less private than the election authorities maintaining the record of who has voted.


I suppose it could help with duplicate voting since some places don't require ID to vote.


ID requirements do practically nothing about duplicate voting.


I mean, if you're willing to spend that much, and it'll be very expensive, then sure. It's just technophobia - machines are going to be more accurate than a human (who also can make a mistake!).


Almost every democratic country on Earth today does it like that, and all democratic countries have done it like that for the last 100-200 years. Counting paper ballots is just not that hard. Machines are infinitely more complex and exploitable.

Plus, you have the extra layer of public perception: it's much easier to convince a chunk of the public that all the machines in some area are miscounting, than it is to convince them that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction.


that all human vote counter in those areas are miscounting, and all in the same direction.

And you can send observers that can watch the entire process.


>watch the entire process.

"Entire" is the keyword here.

Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place.

Anyone and everyone can watch someone count paper ballots, noone can watch a computer count electronic ballots.


> Any programmer worth their salt knows that it's practically impossible to vet that what is executing is 1:1 the code that someone at some point in time audited somewhere, or that the code is worthy of trust from the commons in the first place.

What?

There are entire systems built around doing exactly that. Embedded, military, high-trust.

It's never state of the art performance or mass deployed, because most people would rather have performance and cost optimized over assurance, but it exists and is in production use.

You verify hardware, chain of custody from production to delivery, track every deployed piece of hardware, then lock the firmware and enforce restrictions on anything that executes after that.

It's not easy or cheap (or foolproof, as anything can be exploited), but it's also not impossible. And substantially hardens security.

And for simpler systems with lower performance requirements, completely achievable.

F.ex. voting machines don't need to be running 16-core, hyperthreaded CPUs running multi-process operating systems


> There are entire systems built around doing exactly that. Embedded, military, high-trust.

This is a completely different thing. In those systems, the organization doing the vetting is the one that protects itself through those systems; the good of the organization is presumed to be aligned with the good of the end-users by the threat model. That is, the threat model is purely external to the organization: we are protecting the army's computers from an enemy army or a rogue soldier. An end-user of such a system (say, a low rank soldier sitting in a tank that includes remote-controlled components) can't really trust that those things are used in their best interest. For all they know, the devices are listening to every conversation looking for signs of treason/incompetence - this is still perfectly allowed by an embedded, military, high-trust system. It's the generals that trust the system, as it were, not the individual soldiers.

In contrast, in an election, what we care about is not that the sitting president trusts the results; we care that every individual voter trusts them. And the individual voters are not the ones that have the power to control the way procurement, hiring, vetting, verification, and everything else is done. In fact, the relationship between the electorate and the voting organizers is normally modeled as partly adversarial. The true test of a democracy is whether the populace can easily vote down the people currently in power, the ones that are organizing the election, when they would like to maintain their power.

So yes, I agree that if I am building a system that I want to trust with voting, and I have enough money, I can build an electronic system that I can trust. And you can build one that you can trust. But I can't build one that you can trust, unless you already trust me.


>What?

There is no way to demonstrate that what is executing is the source code unless you're compiling at execution time from a local vetted copy of the source code. Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted? Who vets the vetter? Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about bugs in the compiler? Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs!)?

What about the hardware? Are there any black box enclaves? Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be generally expected of a number cruncher? Does it even have the vetted software?

All this complexity and anyone would be fully within their right to say "I don't and won't trust this."

Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can be immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It's simple and it's brutally effective. So what if the process takes time? Good stuff usually takes time, what's the rush? So what if the human counter(s) screw up? Human errors are inevitable, that's why you count multiple times to confirm the results can be repeated.

The most secure, most hardened, most certified ballot counting machine cannot compare to a simple human counting paper ballots in witness of anyone and everyone.


The questions you're asking make it seem like (a) you're not thinking about this very hard, (b) you're trying to reach the answer you've already decided on, or (c) you're not familiar with high trust systems.

Still, in the interest of a conversation, some brief answers. Please ask in detail about any you're interested in (but realize I'm going to balance the time I spend answering with the time you spend researching and asking).

"Is the guy who vetted the source code vetted?" Yes, because he or she was assigned a key and signed the code with it.

"Who vets the vetter?" Whatever level of diligence you want, up to and including TS+SCI level.

"Is the compiler actually compiling the source code? Is the compiler compiling as generally expected? What about bugs in the compiler?" This is why you test. And it's pathological to believe that well-tested compilers, that have built trillions of lines of code, are going to only fail to successfully compile election code.

"Is the source code even what it claims (binary blobs!)?" See test and also dependency review and qualification.

"What about the hardware? Are there any black box enclaves?" Yes, by design, because that's how secure systems are built. And no, the enclaves aren't black boxes.

"Bugs? Does it actually crunch as would be generally expected of a number cruncher?" Testing and validation.

"Does it even have the vetted software?" Signed executables, enforced by trusted hardware.

> Meanwhile, someone counting paper ballots by hand can be immediately understood by anyone and everyone. It's simple and it's brutally effective

No, it's not. Because people are messy, error-prone entities, especially when it comes to doing a boring process 100+ times in a row.

You're not comparing against perfection: you're comparing against at best bored/distracted and at worst possibly-partisan humans.

Human counts rarely match exactly, because humans make mistakes. And then they make mistakes in the recounts intended to validate counts.

If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail, then I'd reflect on why things never fail at your work because of people, and everything always runs smoothly.


The point is that humans counting paper ballots by hand in the witness of anyone and everyone is and always will be more credible than any voting machine ever. You can certify the digital chain of trust as much as you want, it will not beat human hands counting paper ballots as anyone and everyone watches.

>you're not thinking about this very hard

Yes, because the commons will not think very hard about a complicated "solution" when a much simpler solution already exists.

>If you can't envision all the ways humans can fail,

Yes, humans fail. It's also not important. Any election worth its salt should be counting multiple times using a variety of counters and witnesses to demonstrate repeatability of the vote.

Again: Humans failing is not important.

What is important is the ability to verify immediately and simply how the vote is being tallied. Machines can and will fail (or more likely be corrupted) like humans, but we can immediately see when the human screws up whereas it's impossible to see when the machine screws up.

It's baffling I'm having to argue this to FOSS people of all peoples, you guys should know better than anyone else that vetting source code and binaries and hardware is a fool's errand for something as important as counting votes.

Nothing beats the brutal simplicity of hand counting paper ballots while everyone watches.


Human counters can be biased, and they're definitely more inaccurate. Machines, unless actively exploited by a third party, will always do the same thing, time after time. I don't believe it's worth the extra expenditure to hire tens of thousands of counters (again, human counters adds manual counting into the process, meaning another place for it to go wrong/be manipulated) when machines do the same thing with no fuss.


> Machines, unless actively exploited by a third party, will always do the same thing, time after time.

That "unless" is the whole problem. And it's not just if a third party gets involved, it can well be from the builders or the current operators of the machine who are the ones actively exploiting it as well.


The disconnect is that in most of the world we only vote for one or two candidates on a ballot. In America you vote for everything from the president to the dog catcher on one ballot.

While I think of it, the USA and UK should both stop holding votes on working days. That is nuts! Do what Australia does and vote on a Saturday and make it compulsory.


Are you sure? The last time I voted in Germany they gave me five ballots (EU, state, county, city, district), some with dozens of candidates - per party. I had dozens of votes to give.

Here is a similar example: https://www.volksfreund.de/imgs/scaled/28/1/8/3/7/5/7/5/0/5/...


In Australia, (I believe) you have to pick your top 5...for a bunch of different items you're voting for. Here's an example ballot https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/images/article/2018_LC_Above.png


I'm Australian, that screenshot is from the State election in South Australia, it is an example of how the Upper House ballot paper looks, it is similar in my state New South Wales.

The vertical columns (labelled as Group A to E in screenshot) divide up the political parties. The Greens will be one column, Labor Party another, Liberal Party another column and so on.

There are two horizontal rows separated by a thick line.

You can choose to either vote "above the line" or "below the line" but not both methods.

Above the line is used if you would like to vote based upon the wishes of a political party and below the line is used for "finer grained" voting for individual persons.

For example the Labor party might have 3 Candidates "Fred", "Mary" and "Bob" if I vote above the line I can put a 1 next to the Labor party and then the Labor party's wishes will determine how my vote is distributed.

Or if I Vote below the line I must number 12 different people in the order I want them to be chosen. So I could number Bob from Labor first, Peggy from the Greens second, then Fred from Labor third and so on and I exert exact control over how I want my preferences to be distributed.

edit: Our elections are staggered, The State parliament is elected on different day to the Federal Parliament, which is different to Local City Council elections.


Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug feature for a long time.

The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!


We do it in the UK Volunteers count the votes because they want to see a fair election (and there are ways of checking if someone partisan slipped some votes into the wrong pile).

I agree with GP. Transparency is more important than precision in democracy.

Good engineering is about choosing the right technology, not just the more recent one. Sometimes the right technology is paper.


>machines are going to be more accurate

Says who? Also, what does "accurate" here actually mean?

Speaking as someone who actually understands computers and machines: I agree with the commons (who are simpletons with regards to computers and machines) that machines cannot be trusted to be "accurate" (whatever that means) or even trusted in general.

Especially when a simpler, confirmable-by-anyone method exists: Having someone count paper ballots by hand in the presence of anyone and everyone. That includes mistakes and errors. The value here is anyone and everyone can and will immediately understand (and thus accept) what is going on.

Also, why are we even putting the integrity of the very foundation of our democracy on the table in exchange for convenience and cost of all things? Are we serious? It should be a good thing we are taking precious time and money to make sure our democracy is working properly. I thought democracy was actually fucking important.


Machines are amazing at counting things without losing their place. I'd trust an ATM's counted stack of bills over a human's (for sure if they only each got one try).

I've written some code at a previous job to simplify data entry. The previous method was adding numbers from a stack of papers, with a calculator. I trust my code to add up the numbers on the computer over a human reading them from a printout and entering them in a calculator.

Humans make mistakes. A lot.


If the technical problem was solely about counting then obviously everywhere in the world we would be using machines by now. But we don't. Because the technical problem is trust, not counting.


> Humans make mistakes. A lot.

To put some numbers on this, from my experience.

Health insurance manual claims processors (who usually average ~5 years of experience) can do 95+% accuracy, at speed (a few minutes), at scale. That's counting and verifying multiple things against processing rules.

General data entry, from less trained folks, tends to average around 85% accurate (i.e. 15 mistakes + 85 entries correct, out of 100 entries).


I didn't notice any barcodes -- it looked just like a ballot a human would fill out but with the bubbles filled in as part of the printing

Googling around I think colorado banned ballots with qr codes / non human readable machine encodings .. or at least banned use of them for tallies

https://securitytoday.com/Articles/2019/09/18/Colorado-Becom...


Let's say they get rid of the barcodes and only show the human readable text. How does that prove any better or worse that the machine counted the vote the way it says it did on the slip?

The presence of the barcodes doesn't do anything to reduce the trustworthiness of the system


It starts with being able to tell that the information was encoded correctly when I submitted it.

Tell me this: what is the advantage of a barcode, over a scantron-esque system where I can see which item I chose because a dot is filled in?

The scantron-esque system is still efficiently machine readable; we've had scantron since I was a kid. The difference is, I can verify with my own two eyes that the information is encoded correctly on the ballot I submitted if it's done scantron-style.

I cannot do that with barcodes.

It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place.

JMHO.


>It adds another layer of safety. Do we still have to be able to trust the rest of the system? Yup. But I cannot trust anything at all if I cannot even verify that my vote was submitted correctly in the first place.

I don't disagree that it's strictly better, but the improvements in security are marginal. Any audits/recounts would be done by looking at the human readable part of the ballot, and would therefore be unaffected. Moreover, regardless of whether there's barcodes or not, you'd want to conduct proactive recounts to mitigate any risk for tampered/broken machines. In that case, getting rid of barcodes wouldn't add any security in practice.


With a scantron voting system every single voter becomes an auditor. That’s orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting caught. Not so with barcodes.

Seems a pretty substantial difference to me.


>That’s orders of magnitude more auditing than will ever be achieved by randomized barcode audits and it will catch far smaller discrepancies. Even if a machine made only one mistake ever, it would stand a chance of getting caught. Not so with barcodes.

When was the last time you had a printer print the wrong thing? Moreover, if an election is close enough that a few votes matter, there's definitely going to be a manual recount, so any advantage is purely academic (eg. knowing that candidate A won by 51.704% rather than 51.703%). Point is, either the error is big enough that it's trivially detected with spot checks, or the margins are so close that a manual recount is performed automatically.


How are you auditing what the machine actually rendered from the constellation of dots you filled in for its actual count?

A collection of dots and a collection of bars are the same to me in terms of trusting the computer actually read it right.


But how do you know what position 5 option 2 is set to the person you voted for on the tabulation machine for a bubble fill? It's not like the counting machine is OCR'ing the choice to figure it out. In the end the pattern of dots on a scantron to what the computer thinks the ballot was is just as illegible as a collection of bar codes. It's practically the same thing.

I'm fine with it so long as the choices are also printed in a human readable way at the bottom. If it was just a giant bar code or whatever I wouldn't like it.


Pretty sure GP is saying a scantron-style one can still be flipped or offset at the destination. They use position on the ballot, not OCR, to determine what the vote is.


It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue.

It's about the ability for the voter to determine that their own part of the process -- the recording of their own vote -- is done correctly in every respect.

Each step of the system has to be verifiable as correct for the system to be trustworthy. As it stands right now, I cannot visually verify that my own vote produced a correct printed ballot. I have no way of doing that.

This removes one of the most critical safeguards. If something in the software (malicious or otherwise) records an incorrect barcode, I have absolutely no way of knowing.

That's a problem.

Garbage in, garbage out.


>It's not actually about how the ballot is interpreted by downstream hardware and software. That's a different issue.

To me, this seems like the only part worth worrying about, and any solution to it should satisfy your concerns as well.

Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with them (or make it a hash of their voter registration number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed, the results are posted to a public place. Voters can then confirm their ballot was recorded accurately.

This still doesn't tell you that all the internal variables were incremented correctly, but you can separately aggregate the publicly posted results and compare with the aggregate reported by the machine.

The problem this still doesn't solve is electronically stuffing in fake ballots.


> Every ballot should have a UUID that the voter takes with them (or make it a hash of their voter registration number or something). As soon as the ballot is processed, the results are posted to a public place. Voters can then confirm their ballot was recorded accurately.

Opening the door for vote bribery or voter intimidation.

$1,000 for every tag proving you voted for my candidate.

If you don't prove you voted for my candidate, expect some retaliation!


You can already do that today by having people take a photo of their ballot. Or just buy their signed but otherwise blank mail-in ballot and complete it at gangster HQ. Or give them the money and don't require proof at all, because most people will just do what they agreed to do.

This doesn't happen today because it isn't scalable and is easy to get caught and prosecuted. Electronic manipulation is more appealing because it does not require interacting with people.


Taking a photo of the ballot is illegal. Also, one can just always strike the ballot before putting it in the machine after having the completed ballot. In some places of mail in ballots it's possible to cancel the mail in ballots and vote in person after.


And bribing people to vote is already illegal in the first place. Do things being illegal stop the behavior or not? You're arguing both sides of the coin at this point.

Most people aren't going to try too hard to undermine or outsmart the gangster. Which is why, again, the perpetrator doesn't even need validation of how people actually voted. Vague threats will work just fine. In fact the gangster will still beat up a random sampling of the voters anyway.


There's far less incentive to actually pay bribes or hurt specific people if there's no reliable proof of the vote. Even with people taking a photo of a ballot, one can still just strike that ballot and vote again after taking a photo. It's an immense risk that will likely not do you any good, because there's no way to actually know those people voted. The people you're paying and who voted for you would have likely voted for you anyways and you're just otherwise paying people to not bother voting at all or voting against you, while you face immense risk.

If the gangster is just going to hurt a random sampling of people anyways, you might as well just vote however you want to vote. They may or may not commit violence against you regardless of how you vote, its completely disconnected. If you know they can validate it, you're probably going to be less brave.

Just put yourself in those two situations. One where the ballot is absolutely secret, and one where it can be trivially looked up. Someone says you better vote for X or I'll hurt you. You really don't want to vote for X. In the first instance, do you vote for X? In the second, do you still vote for X knowing the thug will be able to know for sure how you voted?

I'm not suggesting nobody would do an illegal thing, obviously I acknowledge people would do illegal things. I'm just pointing to that as why taking a photo of a ballot is illegal in many areas.



At least the source would be correct so 50% less chance of cheating i.e. the cheating did at least not occur while producing the vote.


1. If all the machine does is mark who you voted on paper than what is the point of the machine over a pencil? 2. If it does more (for example count your vote) then how did you know that it actually did that?

Either way it smells extremely fishy to me.


It avoids dangling chads and improperly filled bubbles which were both used to steal the 2000 presidential election.

I have never used such a machine but the UX could be a lot clearer than the analog filp-and-punch machines used in Florida in 2000.

I don’t love software in the voting process but printing the choices is verifiable and reduces ambiguity in the voting process.


It seems like quite a stretch to say the 2000 election was stolen. There were definitely ballot issues, but Gore challenged it and ultimately decided of his own accord to concede.

He could have continued the challenge and drawn the process out, throwing in throwing in the towel to allow the process to end was his choice, it wasn't stolen.


He didn’t “decide of his own accord to concede”. The US Supreme Court decided for him by ending any further path to count votes in Florida so Gore conceded when be had no other options.


Probably a technicality, but he did still decide to concede. The Supreme Court only ended his specific bid for a recount, they didn't call the election winner or end his campaign.


Definitely a technicality, and interesting only because he chose country over personal ambition. The Supreme Court slammed the door in his face. He could have kept fighting but every available path was even more ugly than what he and the country already endured.


Only since 2020 has it become acceptable/normal/typical/strategy to take your battle against democracy itself.

At least so blatantly visibly explicitly and shamelessly.


When the Supreme Court rules the outcome instead of the voters, and even goes so far as to stress that their actions can't ever be used as precedent in any other matter, it's a uh.. yeah.

Idk I think something was stolen from over half the voters.


It's a bit more complicated than that. Gore lost the initial vote count in Florida. He wanted to recount. That was fine. He lost the recount, but it was closer. Then he wanted specific recounts - to recount the precincts where he thought he would gain the most votes in another recount, and to not recount the ones where Bush would gain votes. Also there were calendar issues - the December date where they have to cast their Electoral College votes was coming up.

It went to the Supreme Court. The SC made two rulings. First, in a 7-2 vote, they ruled that Gore couldn't recount just in specific spots - if they were going to recount, they had to recount everywhere. Second, in a 5-4 ruling, they ruled that they couldn't keep recounting - they had to meet the December deadline with what they had.

That second ruling is what people are talking about when they say the election was "stolen".

Personally, I think the SC was right. Recounting only where you'll gain is cheating - you're trying to win, not trying to have an honest count. And if Florida had missed the deadline, and Gore had won because none of Florida's votes counted toward the Electoral College? That would have been stealing the election. It also would have been a violation of the Voting Rights Act and a bunch of other things.


Your recollection doesn’t agree with Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore.

1. It was the Bush campaign that asked the Supreme Court for a stay.

2. The initial recount was triggered automatically because of the narrow margin. It was not requested by Gore. He did still lose it but by a much smaller margin than before. It turns out that 18 counties in Florida didn’t carry out the recount, although Gore never challenged this.

3. Candidates are allowed to request recounts in individual counties. Gore exercised that right in four traditionally democratic voting counties. Bush had the same right.

4. Later analysis showed that Gore would have lost the counties he requested recounts in but if Florida had properly counted ballots in the first place he would have won.

5. The Supreme Court controversy comes from Florida’s requirement to certify results within 7 days. Several of the counties that Gore requested said they couldn’t complete the recount in that time. The Florida Secretary of State didn’t extend the deadline for certification but did allow counties to continue recounts and amend their results. The Supreme Court stepped in and stayed these recounts, forcing Florida electors to accept the initially certified results and blocking any amended results.


The really interesting thing was that Bush likely would have won following Gore’s recount of only undervotes but lost if they’d recounted both under and over votes:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect...

My main takeaway is that this was within the margin of error so we shouldn’t go crazy trying to play what-if scenarios and getting distracted from blaming Florida for having a bad system which produced high error rates. Once you’re in the noise like that, you’ve guaranteed that someone will be unhappy.


Thanks for the added detail, that's roughly what I remembered as well but definitely a better timeline.

I don't actually remember hearing people describe the election as stolen at the time. I know people weren't happy about it, but either I just lost that memory over time or "stolen" is a newer description of 2000 now that its become so commonplace today.

Either way, I have a hard time seeing an election that was recounted and challenge GED all the way to the Supreme Court as stolen. Contentious for sure, but that sounds like the system working as intended rather than theft.


I was in High school at the time, I definitely remember a feeling that the election was stolen and that Bush was not rightfully elected. I don't remember the general feeling going away until after 2001. There was a large partisan divide at that time.


The difference between then and now was that Gore put the country before himself and conceded.

You can be unhappy with a result, and maybe even see a path towards changing it, but at some point politicians owe it to their country to support its core democratic institutions.

Clearly and publicly accepting well-audited voting results should be first requirement for presidential candidates.

(Said as someone who has thoughts about the 2000 election, but respects what Gore did as a patriotic choice)


Interesting, I was a year out from high school and remember it being really contentious. I just don't remember the phrase "stolen" being thrown around, but that would have been very easy for me to not notice at the time or forget since then.


The earliest that I can find using "stolen" is from 2004, it refers to both the 2004 and 2000 elections as stolen:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-11-05/electronic-vot...

Bonus points for also casting doubt on electronic voting machines :)

A further reference from 2012 has the "stolen" language: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/06/yes-bush-v-gore-did-...


If it was compromised, it wouldn't flip all the votes, it would flip just enough to change the result while staying credible. So the question is how many people double check the paper ballot. Because if it randomly flips, say 1 ballot out of 15, and the paper ballot is consistent with the tally, it could very well go unnoticed.


Not with a randomized audit, such as this one for the 2022 primary [1]. If it flipped just one vote out of 100, and you drew an audit sample of just 1000 votes, the probability of detecting it would be 99.996%.

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/13/colorado-counties-begin-audit...


What do you audit if both the tally and the paper ballot are consistent? The only check possible is the voter checking themselves before they hand over the paper ballot.


Are you saying that the only check possible is looking at it while its in your hand?


The problem stated was that the marker machine lies 1 out of 15 entries. The paper would contain an incorrect selection occasionally. So, yeah, it would require no one noticing during the act.


Indeed, and the math is the same. If out of 3 million voters, just 1000 double-check the printout, they will detect a 1/100 flip with probability 99.996%.


Of course it's important that enough people check their ballot and say, "hey this isn't what I meant" it triggers a formal audit. Not just letting those 1000 have a redo and chalk it up to human error.


Sure, but 1000 is just 1 in 3000 voters. In practice it's going to be way more than that, probably 2 or 3 in 10. Thats hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are going to be punctilious people. Of all the suggested fuckery methods, this would be caught the fastest IMO.


And yet somebody who voted said far above in this thread that the machine reads a barcode on their ballot, so they have 0% chance of verifying if their vote was entered correctly. And there is always the added problem of a dieselgate style obfuscation: The machine counts votes differently when in verification mode than in actual vote counting mode.

My preferred machine would be one that did not use integrated circuits, but was simple enough that the entire board and circuit was visible - with no software beyond the circuitry at all. You just need a very simple sensor and tally wheels that mechanically advance, like those used for measuring wheels etc. No need for memory. Keep automation to the absolute bare minimum.


The ballot printout is not discarded, is it? If not, then the ballot-barcode consistency in the sample can be verified as part of the audit.


And I guess you didn't sign the paper or in any way had means to ensure it wasn't printed with the opposite candidates vote in the next room.

Neither did you have the opportunity to also vote for the other color of the uniparty and cross check the ballots to see they printed identically and according to selection


FTA: “Colorado voter votes on a paper ballot, which is then audited during the Risk Limiting Audit to verify that ballots were counted according to voter intent.”


You get to feed the ballot into the (literal) black box yourself, it beeps and tells you your vote has been recorded. What did it record? Who knows?


> What did it record? Who knows?

How is it any different than traditional voting, where you drop your ballot into a black box and trust the poll workers would count it correctly?

You can do random spot checks select boxes to make sure the machine is tabulating correctly. If they're all correct, you can be reasonably sure the others are correct as well, unless your adversary has incredible luck.


In a serious voting system the paper ballots are saved and can be recounted by hand.

I've worked in elections in Sweden, and all elections are recounted at least twice, by different people.


The issue in the US is compounded further as running elections is left up to not only the states, but the individual municipalities in those states and typically run at the county level.

Each with their own rules, whether or not ID verification is mandatory or literally illegal, style of voting (mail vs in-person), ballot design/UX, what languages the ballots are in (are ballots in Sweden in anything but Swedish?) and mutually incompatible equipment. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ballot designs in use for the current election.

When viewing this at a macro level for electing the office of the President, it seems absolutely insane.


On the flip side; it makes it incredibly difficult to pull off wide scale fraud.

Instead of having to compromise a single system, you are forced to compromise dozens or hundreds of systems run by people with opposing ideologies


Wide scale fraud isn't necessary when elections are decided by 10k votes.


At that point it doesn't matter whether the voting system is centralized or left up to localities. If the election comes down to a few thousand key votes in one or a few localities you are left with a very small number of election systems to keep a close eye on whether that's the central one or a few local ones.

Its also worth noting that just because the central government could run one standardized election process doesn't mean that the election is easier to secure. Ultimately polling places would still be local. Maybe it helps a bit if everyone uses the same system, but that's more about consistency than security.


The point of voting is to kick people out of power when they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the system honest.

As such getting the count absolutely correct isn’t necessarily as important vs more systemic biases like gerrymandering or voter suppression. The vote may be rigged before people started casting ballots, but that doesn’t make voting useless. It’s the strongest signals that are most important and that’s still preserved.


> getting the count absolutely correct isn’t necessarily as important vs more systemic biases

History lesson: The 2004 Washington state governor's election was decided by a mere 129 votes, and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result. The election was extremely controversial and not decided until two days before Christmas. Due to these irregularities, many people did not accept the results for years afterward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

Even more bizarre, the election closely shadowed the plot of the movie Black Sheep, which was released 8 years before.


>and only after multiple recounts and repeatedly "finding" boxes upon boxes of supposedly uncounted ballots in the weeks following election day kept altering the totals and overturned the original result.

The explanations given in the wikipedia article seem pretty plausible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

I don't see how it's any different what happened in the 2020 election, where Trump appeared to win at first, but a bunch of mail-in ballots (which were counted later) turned it around. While I can see why it might seem superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.


> While I can see why it might seem superficially suspicious, such phenomena is inevitable if the pool of mail-in (or other forms of voting liable to get delayed/incorrectly rejected) ballots lean one side.

God help us that Pennsylvania mandates mail-in ballots can only start being counted on election day.


> The point of voting is to kick people out of power when they piss off a clear majority thus keeping the system honest.

This is also a good argument in favor of decentralized voting management, as much of a shitshow as it may be. Centralizing the management of voting under the authority of the people voting intends to kick out of power is potentially self-defeating.


Which 10k votes?

How are you going to have 5 digit numbers of fraudulent voter registrations ready to deploy in all of the critical areas, but also ready to enjoy intense public scrutiny before and after the election. Voter registration databases are public, more or less, so you need to figure out how to fool the people running the election as well as the third party watchers, statisticians, academics, journalists and the veritable army of people who could have their entire career made by uncovering fraud.


If you know exactly which 10k votes you need to compromise, it would be easier to just campaign there.


Not if you have no hope of actually changing their vote.


On the flip side: it makes it incredibly difficult to notice you were a subject of a wide scale fraud.

You need to know an every single system and you can't look for discrepancies what would be obvious in the environment with a standardised system.


Aside from national referendums every few decades, Swedish ballots only contain party and candidate names, no actual language.


This is true here in the US. The paper ballot scans and then goes into a lock-box for possible manual recount.


Depends on the state. Colorado does do this, for what it’s worth.


I thought federal law required paper backups as of 2016-ish? No pure electronic voting today, IIRC.


It appears you're correct, albeit somewhat more recently (2021): https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/u-s-election-commissio...


*ahem*

> and are finally deposited into a box for safe keeping/future recounts


In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them. Living in my small town at one stage, I knew several of the tabulators personally and all of them by reputation. That is an extreme case, but even in a city these people are somewhat known quantities.

With a voting machine that wasn't verified by a hand count it'd be relying on who-knows-who, who-knows-where with an uncertain risk profile.


What do you do when you know the vote counter and don't trust them?


What do you do when you live in North Korea and are worried about an elections integrity? At some point the answer is you survive as best you can.

But to fight corruption you need more transparency and to increase the costs of conspiracies, ie, to head in the opposite direction of voting machines.


> In traditional voting, there is a pretty decent chance you know the person who does the counting or can find someone in your community who can personally vouch for them.

Voting in my area is managed by my county. There's 1.1M people in my county and it's not even the biggest in my state. I'm supposed to personally know all of the few hundred people working the election out of 1.1M spread across 2,200sq km?


No.


Seriously?

You are saying that you just trust some people not to manipulate the votes?

Why not use a Merkle Tree or a Blockchain to verify that your vote was included in the total ?

They were invented to remove trust in middlemen. Mutually distrusting parties can maintain the vote tallying. That’s how elections should be done.


The advantage of just counting in public and having other people vouch is that it is easily understandable by everyone. If you use the blockchain, how many people can be convinced that the election was stolen with some techspeak? Do you think the average citizen understands enough cryptography to validate that the election was legit?


This has me wonder if highschools should start teaching the basic concepts of cryptography so that we eventually do end up with a common understanding of blockchains, password managers, passkeys, or any other technologies that we end up using in our day-to-day lives for crucial tasks.


> common understanding of blockchains

This is funny because as a CS grad, I cringe about 75% of the time when blockchain enthusiasts make pitches that are oblivious to the workings of blockchains, the tech underneath, and their alternatives.

If the blockchain community can't understand blockchain, it's going to be nigh impossible to convey comprehension to the general public.

The general public generally just wants the authorities whose job it is to manage voting to do so in a competent manner. It's worth noting that there's really only been one candidate for national election in modern history who has called into question the fairness of our elections. (And then only when he lost.)

Most of us understand that the folks who work for the Secretaries of State are generally doing the best they can with the resources we provide, and we don't want to provide more resources so they can do a "better" job.


It probably wouldn’t hurt, but you can’t really rely on Highschool education for election security. There are many people that don’t go to Highschool, and those that do probably forget half the stuff after a year. For an election, you want it to be basically obvious how it works in my opinion, anything that takes longer than 5 minutes to explain makes it easier to create doubt in the election.


That wouldn't help for this case. Even a PhD in cryptography and computer science doesn't help you in any way be convinced that a particular machine is securely counting your votes. If you want to be convinced of that, you have to audit the code and the hardware specs and the network code and everything in between to ensure that the system: (a) implements the claimed algorithms, (b) does so correctly and free of side-channeled attacks, (c) doesn't implement other things that can weaken the security after the fact, such as remote code download, and (d) has adequate physical protection to prevent hardware interference. And probably other things I'm not even thinking about.

And all this work doesn't then help you ensure that another machine in a different jurisdiction, even one that is the same make and model, is also secure. Plus, every single person that cares about the vote has to put in this work for themselves: you can't "trust the experts" when the stakes are so high.

I think this pretty clearly goes beyond what you could do teach a high-school setting.


I have a PhD in CS, with peer reviewed publications on using cryptography, and all I learned in my studies is that it’s practically impossible to build a secure voting machine.

I even took a class from a professor who regularly testified to congress on the topic.

Paper ballots all the way.


This is wrong.

You don’t need a Ph D or inspect code to know that your vote is included in a Merkle tree.

And you can verify that the vote total matches what is in the Merkle tree for your district, and the national Merkle tree of districts.

You can also verify that each voter was issued a unique token, which went through a mixer.

About the only thing you can’t verify is that the agency giving out the token hasn’t been corrupted and gave a lot of voting tokens to fake people, or multiple voting tokens. That part (preventing sybil attacks) is why Voter ID laws exist throughout the world.

But reducing the attack surface to widespread corruption issues involving voter registration, is much better than having those AND problets merely counting the ballots by hand, as when eg Al Gore lost to George W Bush in 2000.

The other thing you can’t verify is that other people’s vote wasn’t tampered with — unless THEY report it. Which is why the voting system should require voters confirming votes from multiple devices that verify your cryptographically signed choices, eg vote on a laptop then scan QR code from that laptop with your phone and approve, just as you would with a web payment request in your bank app, crypto wallet or WhatsApp sign-in request. Because voting is not as valuable to people as securing their bank account, this requirement must be enforced on all voters. This way one company eg Google or Apple can’t spoof the interface.


So you agree that you can't verify that the system has one and only vote tabulated for every person that actually voted, or that the vote they intended is the one that got counted. So, you agree that you can't trust the results of this election.

Furthermore, if you check and find out that your own vote was incorrectly counted, you can't actually do anything about it, unless voter anonimity is not guaranteed: if you can't prove to an outside party what your real vote was, you can't pursue any legal action, you just know for yourself that the vote was rigged. And if you can prove to an outside party what you voted, that opens up a whole host of other attacks.

So no, this is not even close to an acceptable solution.

I'll also note that the Bush V Gore election issues were not caused by hand counting, but by machine counting as well. So, they should be taken as further proof that simple ballots and manual counts are the right way to conduct an election.


No, I said that reducing the attack surface to a subset of the problems you normally have is good and makes elections cheaper. That’s what cryptographic protocols, including blockchain, do in general. They replace the need to trust corruptible middlemen, with a protocol that is infeasible or extremely hard to subvert, and which leaves traces of the subversion. Crypto is used all the time such as when you use cryptographic hashes to detect tampering, or merkle proofs to prove something was included correctly in a larger part.

You then replied essentially: “well since you still have some problems, you can’t trust the election… the paper way is the only right way”.

Some people might be wilfully misunderstanding because it’s “cool to rag on blockchain” or whatever. People who always repeat a refrain like “this is simply the only right way to do things” are trying to convince not by arguments but by pushing a dogma. And most skeptics of technologies have been wrong, including skeptics of airplanes, computers, etc.

Estonia for example is already doing secure elections online for years, explain that https://e-estonia.com/how-did-estonia-carry-out-the-worlds-f...

The hand recount took too long and the Supreme Court stepped in and “just picked a winner”. Which later counts showed to have been the wrong result. Citing the machine counting alongside it doesnt really help your case because the machine counting was all kinds of ad-hoc and hybrid things (including the dreaded silly “butterfly ballots”) which is exactly what people advocate for, when they try to argue for avoiding a fully consistent and uniform electronic system. They want all the little variations and manual counting “so no one can hack the whole thing”. So yes it’s a perfectly valid argument to point out that delays caused by this led to the wrong outcome (and had consequences like ignoring Bin Laden, allowing 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, clamping down on civil liberties in USA, raiding Social Security etc.)

All the problems you cited above are present in the current system — including having to prove how you voted to challenge the results. Except in the current system there are far more problems, including not even being able to physically show up at the polling place (because it is too far), or proving that the poll workers corrupted your vote, added extra ballots, literally anything. Out of sight out of mind I guess.

And across the world, elections are done even worse. Consider the recent election of Lukashenko in Belarus. People in districts where he got 80% were trying to ask around who voted for him and complained that very few had said they did. It’s all arguments based on hearsay. That is the flip side of not being able to prove how you voted. In fact if they wanted to know how you voted, in your manual system, they could just take a camera outside the booth and look at timing to know when you voted. Or just put a camera in the booth. But in fact it’s far worse than that, the voter databases include driver’s licenses and addresses and social security numbers, in most US states, AND party affiliation is 94% correlated to how you vote so all this paper ballot “security theater” to prevent “being ABLE to prove how you voted” gets you nowhere: https://ballotpedia.org/Availability_of_state_voter_files

And oh yeah… in the system I described you can anonymously challenge the results because you have cryptographic signatures but your own private key came out of a mixer, so you don’t need to identify yourself to prove your vote didnt match what’s in the system. Enough complaints and we ALL know which districts were corrupt, and very quickly.


In paper based systems, you and other volunteers do most of the counting, alongside representatives of all parties. None of the problems I described exist in such a system: you can't add a million votes unless you convince a whole lot of volunteers and representatives of the parties that they are real votes. You can't put multiple votes in unless none of those same people see you. If one volunteer attempts to change a vote, another one will stop them. If you think your vote was miscounted, a re-count can be issued, with even more observers, and the exact same artifacts are available for all to see (how do you fix an error in the Merkle tree, even if everyone agrees it happened?). Even if you have an extremely corrupt county, that doesn't generally matter in the grand scheme of things; and its extremely unlikely, as any citizen in that county can stop the corruption by simply participating in the process themselves.

Wide-scale voter fraud of this kind is simply impossible in a paper system. The only times it happens is like in Belarus, where it's not "an election", it's a public show that looks like an election, but where the result is pre-determined. The Merkle tree would show the same thing there: it's a mock election to make it look like a mock democracy. Lukashenko wouldn't have stopped leading the country even if miraculously the election would have shown he lost. Or, it can happen in other more complex and more discoverable ways, such as busing voters around to physically vote multiple times in multiple (preferably far away) polling places.

As for Estonia, they'll come to regret this system sooner or later. It can work for a while, but there is no doubt that the system will get hacked, or the losing party will be able to convince enough people that it got hacked even if it didn't. Someone will accidentally publish private keys, like in this Colorado case. The system will go down on election day because of a bug. Who knows which one will be first, but it'll end their experiment. The rest of the world will continue with paper voting and not face such problems.


“In paper based systems, you and other volunteers”

No, 99.99% of “you” go home and “trust the system” to some poll workers, many with major bias and incentives. Many of “you” don’t turn out to vote or are disenfranchised by simply living too far from the polling place or not being able to take time off work, when you could have just voted from your app.

Certain parties even rely on suppressing turnout. (Can you guess which party does that in USA? Hint: it’s the one that closed 1600 polling stations right after the Voting Rights Act got neutered, and then got mad about mail-in ballots ruining their carefully laid disenfranchisement plans during the pandemic.).

In fact, if you want the election to be “secured by multiple distrusting parties”, that is exactly what byzantine-fault-tolerant cryptographic protocols (which power many blockchains) are designed to do.

(how do you fix an error in the Merkle tree, even if everyone agrees it happened?). Even if you have an extremely corrupt county, that doesn't generally matter in the grand scheme of things; and its extremely unlikely, as any citizen in that county can stop the corruption by simply participating in the process themselves.

You are literally arguing from a double standard. In a paper election, somehow “any citizen” by themselves can stop the corruption… by simply participating in the process.” Yeah sure one guy exposes the entire corrupt county, with no ability to prove how anyone voted, why didn’t a single Belarussian and Venezuelan think of that? LOL” And on the other hand, when you have tons of anonymous irrefutable proofs by participants submitted publicly, you throw up your hands and say “what can we do to fix the merkle tree, even if we all knew it was corrupt?” The point of the trre is to catch errors, prove them and publish the proofs widely. As a society, you then have the proof nexessary to fix errors the same way you’d normally do it — by identifying the corrupt districts, and having a recount or revote just there. And bringing those responsible for tampering to justice.

If you stop conflating all the things and unpack them, you’ll see that adding cryptography makes things strictly better:

1. You have more chances to catch if there have been extra votes cast because the private keys are coming from tokens handed out at registration. In a paper election you might have corruption at registration AND all manner of ballot stuffing later too.

2. Everyone can check their vote and report a discrepancy. Not just the volunteers at the polling places. And all because they can prove how they voted and do it anonymously!

3. Everyone can see exactly which districts are corrupt in giving out fake voter registrations, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. They can do an audit and guess what, the cryptographic signatures are helpful for creating a PROVABLE trail that implicates the system.

4. The attack surface reduces to pretty much just the voter registration sybil attacks. Eliminating a whole class of problems on actual election day.

5. The results are reported to everyone reliably and quickly, or even in real-time (though the latter is “too good” because it might affect how later voters vote).

There’s practically not a single problem that adding cryptography creates, which wasn’t already present in the paper system. And you know all this because if you honestly asked yourself whether dictators, who want sham elections, would want to do their next election with cryptographic signatures and merkle trees or not — what would be your answer? Be honest. And think about what that means for your argument.


I'm pretty sure there are more than 20,000 polling workers in the USA, so no, it's not 99.9% who go home and trust. And most importantly, for every republican there is a democrat and vice versa, in every polling place, auditing the process in real time.

And the reason you can fix this at the polling station level is simple: as long as the entire state is not captured by a single party (in which case no real elections are happening), the rest of the state can come in and fix the bad locations.

Related to your points:

1. If there are more ballots than registered voters, this is easy to check. It's even better than a private key system, as extra registrations can also be caught on the day of polling, if people actually come in and vote again, whereas extra private keys being handed out will not see an election official again.

2. There is no way to actually "prove anonymously how you voted". To move the needle in any way, you have to come out personally and say "I know I voted like this, but the system shows me as voting like that, here is what it shows when I present my private key". And either way, this is actually a weakness of the system, as it allows trustworthy vote selling.

3. I don't understand how this is supposed to be any easier than in the current system. You still won't know how many people were legally allowed to be registered in that district, so what are you comparing against?

4. No, the threat surface is the entire electronic system. Someone can attack the system and prevent voters from getting private keys, issue corrupted keys, allow more keys than were registered, present the results differently from what is stored in the merkle tree, use side channels to decrypt private keys, exfiltrate data about individual voters, and who knows how many other ways. Plus, if you can vote from anywhere, you can be coerced, especially by family or caretakers, to vote in their presence, or disclose your private key so they can vote in your name themselves.

And all this assumes the system is an actually secure Merkle tree. In reality, it would just be a computer program that takes your vote and shows you some data. What is actually running on the server is impossible for you to know unless you are given access to the hardware and software.

5. Sure, this is a clear advantage.

You are severely underestimating the risks of an electronic system, and only looking at the purely theoretical logical core. All of the systems around it, through which you interact with the core system, and all of the human factors around using the systems, are a huge attack surface. For example, would you trust this system and issue your vote from a phone or PC which you know is infested with malware? If not, then you have to agree that every device is part of the attack surface of this system.

Finally, in relation to your challenge, elections held by dictators are only meant to look like elections in more legitimate countries. So, if most countries hold paper elections (which is by far the majority), then the dictators will put on a show like that. If the majority of countries used electronic voting, dictators would also get electronic voting machines. Still, I don't know of any dictator that bothers to make a show of how free and correct are their elections.


Thank you for engaging point by point. Let’s look:

1) Easy to check by whom? With paper, it’s a bunch of people yelling to the news they saw discrepancies. In USA, we have probably the most expensive election in the world and we heard it all in 2020 from sour Republicans. To this day many people believe the election wasn’t secure and was “stolen”, including with physical ballots being shipped in, etc. On the one hand you have people yelling and on the other side you have people saying it’s all fine. Just like after a Venezuela or Belorussia election or the Crimea referendum. None of that would be the case if the elections could just have a standard way to be run, same as we now have electronic standards for DNSSEC or certificate PKI the EVM or IEEE standards. We can do things at scale because of standards. We could remove most of the uncertainty.

2) You don’t have to come out and reveal your PII, in order to publish a complaint as a voter. You’d just have to reveal that you know the private key, here is your receipt signed by the vendors in the system, and here is the actual result the UX vendors reported. The reputation of the vendor would be PROVABLY destroyed, all those receipts would be entered as evidence and they’d have to pay reparations in lawsuits. All because people were forced to double-check from 2 devices. The UX vendor would face chilling effects far larger than currently, for tampering with an election. None of this requires PII of the claimants.

3 and 4. You say it’s the whole system but proceed to list only things related to registration. Which, I already said, remains an issue, but the actual voting can be done on a phone. All your concerns could be also done with a banking app etc. where far more money is at stake than a single vote, yet people use them all the time.

I am not sure how you are supposed to impersonate a person unless you steal their phone, and then force them to open the voting app and enter their biometrics, just for a lousy vote — and you’d have to do this all across town at scale? Nan.

If you’re saying that a bank can “roll back a transaction” if you report losing your app, and somehow the election reaching finality (like a blockchain transaction) is a negative, then you’re saying that

As for people losing their private keys or phones or maybe so poor they can’t afford to have a computer or whatever, they can register to vote in person. If they failed to update their registration, though, before the election, and they can’t vote from their phone, it’s the same issue as if they didnt register at all. So they didn’t vote. But on net there is a much bigger turnout.

5. Okay we agree here. And this isnt an academic point — Al Gore would have been president if they could have counted the votes faster, we could have probably avoided the entire Middle East being on fire, the rollback of US civil liberties, maybe even prevented 9/11 with NORAD, and finally could have avoided the current disastrous wars in Ukraine etc. since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine)

I think we both know that a corrupt government would not want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they’d have no way to fudge the results reliably. By making decision-making cheap, the public in every country would be welcomed to hold regular referendums on topics (like California Proposition XYZ) and the governments would be MORE accountable to the people. (Personally, I think provably random polling is superior to voting, due to turnout issues, but that’s another story).

You can say whatever you like but when the rubber meets the road, corrupt officials and their detractors overseas (the war hawks looking to cast doubt on any way to figure out what, say, the actual people of Crimea or Donetsk want) both prefer paper ballots and the effective inability to cast absentee ballots when you fled the country or were internally displaced. While cryptocurrency allows you to take your money with you while fleeing a war zone, the crypto-voting would let you vote from anywhere as long as you had registered as a citizen back before being displaced etc.

It’s literally technology you can add to secure things and corrupt governments avoid it, war hawks across the world hipe they don’t use it, and you are arguing that even adding it makes things less secure and less reliable.


Since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway.

Except he did not "push them into NATO in 2008". 2008 was the year that Ukraine's membership application was formally rejected by NATO, and there it has sat, in the doghouse, ever since. But Putin invaded anyway, because the NATO noise was never the reason he invaded in the first place.

The most significant consequence of the Bush presidency was probably the criminally insane invasion of Iraq -- which arguably did encourage Putin to go into Ukraine, on equally vacuous and fraudulent pretexts. "If they can get away with it, then why can't I?" was apparently his thinking.


NATO member countries didn’t really want Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens really didn’t want NATO, but in 2008 Bush vowed to press for both Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bush-to-press-for-ukra...

Saakashvili of Georgia (who is now in jail for corruption) also had two breakaway republics at the time — Ossetia and Abhazia — and he engaged in a war with them and kept hoping NATO would come. Back then Putin wasn’t even president, it was Medvedev. Anyway, the same exact war started happening back then, with Russia invading Georgia with tanks moving slowly to the capitol, Tbilisi. Their goal was to intimidate them into agreeing to stop shelling the two breakaway republics and leave them alone. (Georgia and Armenia, in turn, had been protected by Russia from Ottomans, much the same way).

The difference in that war was that it ended in a week, because Nicolas Sarkozy (the French president) negotiated a peace agreement successfully. Since then Russia hasn’t invaded Georgia further, simply protected Abhazia and Ossetia, in fact Georgia has been normalizing relations with Russia and opened up direct flights and tourism last year etc. A great outcome for all civilians, compared to what could have been a senseless war. I was in Georgia last year and saw it firsthand.

Meanwhile, after the regime change revolution in Ukraine in 2014, the CIA had 8 years to build up weapons and paramilitaries etc. Same exact playbooj that ravaged Afghanistan w the mujahideen (Arabic for “jihadists”) and Afghan Arabs, masterminded by Zbignew Brezhinski. This time it was CIA in Ukraine: https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...

So in 2022 when Russians tried the same playbook (intimidate Kyiv into not shelling the two breakway republics) they didn’t expect the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiating table. They waited for them in Belarus under Lukashenko (where they had signed the Minsk accords years earlier, endorsed unanimously by the UN security council) but the Ukrainian negotiators kept delaying and venue shopping, and the SBU (Ukrainian KGB) even killed one of them as “a traitor” for being too eager to negotiate, a man appointed by the President himsdlf and who the Ukrainian state department called “a hero”.

I personally spoke to David Arakhamia (the guy w the hat) on Facebook Messenger in the first days of the war, he had many Ukrainians on his FB wall begging him to make a deal and avert the war. I tool screenshots and the pleading posts are still there. He privately told me he agreed w me. But when the negotiators entered the room they left after 2 hours. We don’t kmow what happens in closed rooms — whether Baker promised “not an inch” to Gorbachev, or whether the Ukrainian or Russian negotiators ever negotiated in good faith. But the civilians, the people deserve better representation. The war continued, and the tanks found themselves around Kyiv and major firefights in Bucha vs Azov and other armed groups with RPGs shooting at tanks. Kind of like the red triangle videos of Hamas vs Israeli tanks. It’s really unfortunate and was avoidable. Russia expected it to go like the last war, it didn’t.

Naftali Bennett was the Israeli PM and he could have played the role of Nicolas Sarkozy did with Medvedev (Russia) and Saakashvili (Georgia). He has a tell-all interview in Hebrew about how he had negotiated peace DIRECTLY between Putin and Zelensky, and had them both make major concessions — eg Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO, and Putin promised not to kill Zelensky. In his interview he said that Zelensky double-checked this and then came out to record his famous video “I am not afraid, I am here” and saying he needs ammunition, not a ride.

Why did Bennett not succeed? He said he “coordinated everything to the smallest detail” with the US and UK, he “doesn’t do as he pleases”, and they told him he MUST stop the peace deal. He said he “thought they were wrong” and still does. That peace is worth a shot. But he didn’t continue, and the war didnt stop 2 weeks into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs

Erdogan luckilh WAS able to negotiate a year-long grain export deal in the midst of a war, which likely saved millions of lives — Yemen had been very dependent on Ukrainian grain and had a famine from yet ANOTHER proxy war (this one between Iran and Saudis w US weapons, same kind of war but with roles reversed). But no one seemed to care about Yemenis, despite millions being in far more dire hunger conditions than Ukrainians ever were.

The world is complex, but Bush had started the stupid push into NATO, even as NATO members were slowwalking him. My guess is he was angry at Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 NATO, calling out USA for invading Iraq and violating international law. Back in 2001 Putin was the first president after 9/11 to call Bush and offer condolences and they made a joint anti-terrorism initiative. Putin wanted to join NATO back in 2001, he asked the NATO heads but was always rejected. Since 2002(!) Russia tried to stop the invasion of Iraq in the security council and every other way it could but Bush couldn’t be stopped. That is when I think Russia realized that after Kosovo and Iraq, that NATO isnt purely defensive and USA isnt going to be constrained by international law. Putin’s speech in 2007 made Bush want to flip Russia’s neighbors (about which every ambassador said it was a red line for anyone in Russia, “not just Putin”) so the result was predetermined:

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...

As for why Bush did it — I will let Bush say it in his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTX5uvZWu3Q


Right - Bush "pressed for" Ukraine's membership, but he wasn't successful. And in fact Putin had executed (what he should have seen as) a successful containment strategy by that date, via purely diplomatic means. Sanity prevailed, reason prevailed -- but Putin invaded anyway. That's the key takeaway here.

As to the other tangents, briefly:

(1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with) Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer territory).

The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also entirely different; the violent aspects of these conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities inflicted by both sides).

There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is attempting to annex - which never saw any violent separatist conflict prior to Putin's invasion via proxy forces in 2014.

In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same exact war" is really quite silly.

(2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians could have just walked away by making basically symbolic concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all would have been well; and that we just don't really know happened because it was all behind closed doors.

This is a false characterization. By now we do have a pretty good idea of what happened, because the proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but drastic reductions in force that would have effectively left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any kind. Against this backdrop there were also the atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on Russia's good word for their security would not be in their best interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812302

(3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of story.


I am making that analogy, there are so many elements in common, and the analogy to other proxy wars like Yemen too.

You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”. Both are nonsense, of course!

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/09/01/how-jimmy-carter-st...

https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and...

And of course, after Yugoslavia and Libya we know that NATO isn’t a “purely defensive” organization, and its member states like USA sometimes form coalitions to go invade other countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, and occupy them for years just like the Soviets.

You must not know the history of cold war proxy wars very well to ignore all the parallels and the patterns that repeat and repeat.

Isn’t it a bit silly to just say “period, end of story” and just deny it? This is how people solve problems — by looking at similar situations around the world. You don’t fix a refrigerator by refusing to look at every other refrigerator and treating it as a special snowflake. Same here.


You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”.

One could, but it'd be silly as you already know, and no one is doing that.

Hence, no analogy here.


Ultimately none of these details matter given the elephant in the room: you're voting on some app using your private key, and using some app to check with your private key if the vote has been correctly registered. But you have 0 way of knowing if the system is using this data in the way it was presented. For all the info you have access to, the system can just as well work like this:

1. You cast your vote using the private key

2. This gets registered on a server, it remembers "this person voted for X"

3. When you ask the system "who is my vote registered for?" the system tells you "X"

4. When computing the totals used to decide the election, the system returns 90% Y, 10% X, regardless of the actual votes cast.

Now, this very simplistic scheme would be easily defeated by asking them to publish the whole database of votes. But that would just break the anonymity guarantee of the election, so it is a no-go. And if they destroy the relationship between your vote and your private key, then again you can't confirm anything.

By the way, because you were citing Estonia's e-voting, I read up on it a little: they have all of these problems, and more. For now, people choose to trust the government, I assume and hope rightfully. But their e-voting system relies entirely on secure client devices, it relies entirely on trust that the servers are running the published source code, it relies on the proprietary closed-source client app being trustworthy. And people have even hacked their own vote to show that it's possible, which their supreme court found is not a problem with the election, since it was still their own vote. They barely even have some form of verifiability, and even that is relatively new.

I have no doubt that if a pro-Russia party had a realistic chance at winning (such that the populace and the incombent government would accept the results of an election where they won), Russian state actors would hack their systems and seek to get their people elected (whether they would succeed is of course hard to say). As would the USA if, say, a Latin American state used electronic voting and had an election where the decision was important enough. Or China in Africa, or Israel in the Middle East, etc.

> I think we both know that a corrupt government would not want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they’d have no way to fudge the results reliably.

I think you seriously don't understand what a sham election is, what people know about it, and why it is done. Sham elections don't use semi-sophisticated means of voter fraud that could be thwarted by a better voting scheme. They don't have corrupt officials surreptitiously changing or adding a few votes.

They are entirely ceremonial affairs, where both the people voting and all of the officials know what the results will show beforehand. Often there aren't even options on the ballot. Even if there are, people choosing the wrong option will be threatened, possibly arrested for political crimes, etc. Everyone in countries with sham elections is well aware their vote doesn't matter, or it only matters in so far as the wrong vote can be like wearing an "I hate Big Brother" hat out on the streets in 1984.

The purpose of a mock election is to have some semblance of a normal electoral process to have a minimum of plausible deniability to facetiously claim you are following a democratic process. If people overall believed that the right way to do elections is electronically and by publishing a Merkle tree of the results, corrupt governments would hold sham electronic elections and publish made up Merkle trees.

You'll then have stories from journalists going and asking for people to compare their votes against the public tree, and seeing their votes are different. Just like today you have journalists coming back with stories of entire villages voting for the dear leader when local villagers say they didn't even enter the polling station. And it will matter just as little: the ritual of the election is the only thing that matters.


Just to be clear - even though I say “Merkle Tree”, I am not saying the unhashed votes themselves would not be stored in it. The hashes are just to quickly verify integrity of the underlying data leaves (the actual votes people cast).

The anonymity is done between registration and voting. There is a cryptographic mixer like Tornado Cash that is responsible for the unlinkability, by “tumbling” the tokens to anonymize them while still making sure that each person voting legitimately had registered. (Never mind for a moment that the IP address of the voter can be tied to their address, that can be fixed too.)

So yes, ALL the votes are stored and published in the Merkle tree, and ANYONE can challenge the election, not by hearsay allegations but actual PROOF that anyone can verify. Because the public keys of the UX vendors are published along with the Merkle Tree and are caught red-handed signing conflicting votes. Either the corrupt districts or the UX vendors would have to risk literally ANYONE producing a smoking gun. It is that chilling effect that keeps them all honest, and why we have checksums for things in general. Having everyone in the world see proof of fraud is very different than a bunch of villagers claiming to a journalist locally that they hadn’t even voted.

So given this description, tell me directly — doesn’t it ADD a lot of security and reduce the attack surface and make elections standardized, cheaper and far more trustworthy - don’t you see the value in that?

Think about it — this scheme alone allows some great integrity features for elections. The “election Luddites” are essentially claiming that this has ZERO VALUE and shouldn’t even be tried, shouldn’t even be ADDED TO the existing paper systems even if you lost nothing, because it adds NO SECURITY. That is quite a claim given the properties I listed!

More generally, this is how Smart Contracts work and why they are valuable. Thousands of independently run nodes get to check the data and operations, which are public. The entire community benefits, and in fact the results of voting (eg how much UBI to give out) can be used on-chain. By lowering the cost of collective decision-making, blockchain technology enables a whole new level of efficiency (much like red lights enable better traffic flow), making things like elections or large marketplaces available to everyone without “offchain” corruption-peone mechanisms like surety bonds and reliability ratings (remember Lehman Brothers?)

Check out https://intercoin.org/applications — I would love to hear your thoughts on the other applications too.


> There is a cryptographic mixer like Tornado Cash that is responsible for the unlinkability, by “tumbling” the tokens to anonymize them while still making sure that each person voting legitimately had registered.

This is not anonymity, it is pseudonimity, if the system then records "person in control of key K voted for X". Sure, it may be impossible to tell who is that person, unless they come out. But that person can prove to anyone they want that they voted for X (assuming the system were trusted, see more on that below), so they can be forced to show someone who they voted for, either through direct coercion or as a condition for receiving money for their vote. In contrast, once you put a paper ballot in the urn, it is impossible for anyone to tell who you voted for.

> So given this description, tell me directly — doesn’t it ADD a lot of security and reduce the attack surface and make elections standardized, cheaper and far more trustworthy - don’t you see the value in that?

No, it only gives a false sense of security, which is worse. Everything you are describing relies on trust in the people that build these systems, trust in the people that invent the algorithms, trust in the people that invent the maths, trust in the chosen parameters of the cryptographic systems, and so on. Literally none of what you are describing works if you don't trust in all of these people to be (a) honest, and (b) really really good at what they're doing.

It's infamously easy to screw up an encryption implementation, even given a well known and accepted algorithm. It's even easier to screw up a market system and end up with perverse incentives which were not apparent when the system was put in place (like the infamous, though possibly apocryphal, cobra farms).

I asked you before as well: would you be happy to issue your vote from a PC that you know is infested with malware the CIA/FSB/etc controls? If not, then you must admit that the cryptographic guarantees are only a small part of the security of the process, and the whole thing, from client to network to server, needs to be perfectly secure or the election can be stolen.

And you are proposing to add this to a paper based ballot system that is (a) dead simple; (b) almost universally used; (c) proven secure enough in many thousands of elections.

I'll also note that, as always, the blockchain part is not adding anything to all of this. You can just as well have the encryption guarantees and an open protocol with government-run servers, WWW style; that would have all the same problems, but at least it wouldn't also require some bizarre proof-of-stake (what would even be the stake here???) or wasteful proof-of-work scheme to depend on for security.

Finally, I'll come back to this point:

> not by hearsay allegations but actual PROOF that anyone can verify

Nothing you are describing can prove anything. It all still relies on your claim that you were trying to vote X, but the system registered you as voting Y. It's your word against the system. You can be convinced yourself, but you can't 100% convince anyone else.

Edit: note, I am the same person as tsimiones, just posting from a different account from my work computer; not trying to make it seem like multiple people are taking my position or anything like that.


No, it only gives a false sense of security, which is worse. Everything you are describing relies on trust in the people that build these systems, trust in the people that invent the algorithms, trust in the people that invent the maths, trust in the chosen parameters of the cryptographic systems, and so on. Literally none of what you are describing works if you don't trust in all of these people to be (a) honest, and (b) really really good at what they're doing.

Now it's getting a bit silly. Imagine saying about all the technology infrastructure we use daily, such as electricity and computers, that since they require "trust in the people who built these systems, trust in the people who invent the algorithms, maths, and parameters of the curves etc" therefore they are giving a "false sense of security". No! The math isn't just arbitrary, the people aren't just cobbling together a computer I happen to buy. There are literally standards bodies, scientific literature, audits and much more. There are entire ecosystems for error-correction. Otherwise, throw away your technology, you're trusting phone and computer vendors, you're trusting mathematicians with math, and scientists with science... and that's actually worse than living in a world where you fetch water yourself from the river. What? No, it's not.

If you're down to those kind of arguments, I and people like me would conclude that you're out of good ones, and we have a good solution after all.

A paper ballot system isn't great at all -- it is far too slow and expensive and frustrating to run an election, and voter turnout is low for traveling and standing in line -- and certainly it is not "proven secure enough in many thousands of elections". Many elections around the world are disputed, contested, insecure, and the ones you think are secure, are also contested (e.g. the 2020 election, the 2000 election, the 2016 election). You dismiss it in cases you like (US elections) and are happy for your politicians dispute it in cases you don't like (Venezuela) etc. Even if the Supreme Court of Venezuela weighs in, you wouldn't trust it. It's a canvas on which everyone can paint their own outcome, and claim the other side "stole" the election (as if their side didn't engage in similar shenanigans to cancel it out).

If we switched to electronic systems, verification would be so cheap that anyone could do it (as it is for, say, verifying files you downloaded from the Internet with a checksum, which wasn't always the case with previous technology such as analog-to-digital MoDeMs without cryptographic security) -- not only that but it would enable so many more applications. Imagine using Git version control without a SHA1 checksum, and just "trusting the system" to never flip a bit. Imagine not being able to use Merkle Trees for downloading files, verifying their integrity, etc. These things not only improve security and reliability at almost no cost, but enable a whole class of things that would be impossible with pen and paper. Seriously you don't see a difference between, say, BitTorrenting movies and Roman scribes copying into a clay pad? Oh, but we're trusting people who discovered electricity, invented general-purpose computers and the hash algorithms, what if they're trying to trick us and will finally rugpull us all in 2025? Alan Turing and John Von Neumann will have the last laugh as we'll all download the RickRoll files instead of the ones we want.

Nothing you are describing can prove anything. It all still relies on your claim that you were trying to vote X, but the system registered you as voting Y. It's your word against the system. You can be convinced yourself, but you can't 100% convince anyone else.

Not at all. If someone was able to record a signature that their voting gateway signed vote for X as vote for X, but then later that same service claimed they voted for Y, they are caught red-handed cryptographically signing with the private key two conflicting votes. You're equating that to some villagers telling some journalist on camera that they never voted. Ugh. One can be verified by anyone, the other is just hearsay by some journalist.


There is a major difference between trusting regular infrastructure and trusting elections infrastructure. The threat model is completely different. For one, vote secrecy makes it impossible to prove that your vote was mis-registered. For another, in normal situations the cyber-adversaries I need to worry about are regular criminals, for which basic computer security practices are good enough. But votes in an election are improtant enough that nation-state actors are a real threat, and I am absolutely certain that my phone or laptop are not secure against hacking attempts by a nation, or even potentially my own government!

Not to mention, elections are the only situation where trust in my government is not fully possible: the current government has too much incentive to steal votes secretly. So, unlike the electrical grid, roads, financial infra and so on, I can't rely on implicit trust in the government to trust elections.

> If someone was able to record a signature that their voting gateway signed vote for X as vote for X, but then later that same service claimed they voted for Y, they are caught red-handed cryptographically signing with the private key two conflicting votes.

If. What if instead my voting app is showing me that my vote was correctly registered, and that key verification succeeded while the polls are still open, but once the polls close, it shows me that in reality the server registered the opposite vote? How do I prove to anyone else that I voted for X and the app was showing me I voted for X, but now the system shows I voted for Y, and that is what is recorded in the official counted results?

This doesn't even require anyone breaking the encryption: the app can just show me a lie, or some malware can intercept the display info and show a different result, etc. To not leave any trace, the malware even deletes itself from the system as soon as the election timeout expires. Or maybe I am just lying and nothing wrong happened: I voted for Y, the system recorded I voted for Y, and now I'm just trying to cast doubt. Same as a paper based election, anyone can claim anything, and it's exactly as impossible to prove one way or the other.

Plus, again, only a very very very small group of people can actually confirm for themselves that all of these complicated crypto algorithms actually do what they promise to do. Especially when looking at the end to end system. I for one am certain I couldn't verify for myself that all steps of such a system is secure. I would bet you can't either. If, say, Ron Rivest (of RSA fame) came out and said the cryptography used in the election is broken, while Adi Shamir (same) said it isn't, I would have no way to be certain which is right, and even if I tried to verify the math myself, I wouldn't trust myself as much as either of them.


In this day and age the counting should at least be live streamed. Almost every big box store in the US already has a self checkout area that's almost equipped for this task (it has the hardware and the software, just not the physical layout). Publicly (like a public park, not like a "public" school) verifiable vote counting shouldn't be a hard problem.


In a hand count you might get the odd bad actor, but you're unlikely to get large scale systematic bias, which is much easier to introduce in a machine counting system.


“the odd bad actor” is incredibly optimistic, almost like there is already a bias against ever digitizing or using cryptography for adding security to a manual process with tons of ways to corrupt an election

Elections around the world do not match this optimistic characterization. If they did, we’d all trust the outcomes of:

Belarus’ election of Lukashenko

Venezuela’s election of Maduro

Crimean 2014 referendum

Kosovo’s independence referendum

(Note you probably think the last one was a lot more reliable than the first three — a lot of it has to do with living in a certain part of the world and believing the national media, which is only possible because the voting system and results can be so untrustworthy as to not allow regular people around the world to check anything, so propaganda is given free reign. Science and reliable knowledge usually doesn’t work this way.)

In fact, let’s be clear… the “dictators” WANT the elections to have many ways to corrupt them, they WOULDN’T want a blockchain or merkle tree, that should tell you a lot

And the “war hawks” in countries like USA who oppose their geopolitical rivals also want the elections and referendums to not be secure and clear, so they can cast doubt on them (eg Crimea) while at the same time claiming others (like Kosovo) are completely legit and justify unprecedented actions .

As an aside, the vast majority of both Crimea[1] (94%) and Kosovo[2] (99%) that turned out to vote in referendums in 1991 voted for independence, so we all pretty much know what the public wanted later too, but it doesn’t affect the spin put on the later referendums and conflicts anyway

If elections were secured by cryptography, the People around the world would have far more confidence, rather than listening to their own media propaganda spin the ambiguities, and the wars might even be avoided.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_autonomy_referend...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Kosovan_independence_refe...


That seems like it'd be impossible to implement. Either I'd have a record that I voted with no way to confirm who my vote was counted for, or I'd be able to prove that I voted for a specific candidate which opens a Pandora's box of problems (either coercion for voting for the wrong candidate or bribes for provably voting for a specific candidate).

I mean sure, if someone can come up with a workable blockchain-based system that would be good, but I don't think that is an in-practice option on the table right now.


First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others

But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown. The same people who say you don’t need an ID to vote because it’s a non-issue then come up with fantasy scenarios of masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or bribed to do it LOL.


> masses of people being forced to prove how they voted, or bribed to do it LOL

Would you believe that in some households, the husband considers his wife's vote as his property? And that there are lots of households like this?

It doesn't have to be a singular mass of people being coerced by a single entity. Lots of wives being coerced by lots of husbands is also corrosive to elections.


I don't know if there's a lot of bribery risk, but a family member asking to see how you voted has plenty of room for coercion and abuse. It seems good that no one but you can know how you voted in principle.


> First of all zero-knowledge proofs allow you to verify stuff without being able to prove it to others

I doubt it, and I suspect if you try to point at a specific system to implement you will find that that none exist even in theory. I can verify I voted with zero knowledge, yes. But I can't verify who I voted for. So I can put candidate A into the machine, it switches to candidate B and we can all prove I voted in the election.

Conversely, if I can prove who I voted for then the scheme is vulnerable to the well known after-election issues because I can prove it to others. If I can only prove something with plausible deniability note that I probably can't tell if the machine switched my vote around. There might be something that can be done in the space, but it is a tricky one to resolve.

> But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.

If you check you may well find it in a reasonable-worse-case scenario it is a matter of life-and-death. I think maybe literally zero government electoral systems make the voter's vote public (ie, we have near universal secret ballots [0])? There is a reason for that. If we wanted people to sign their name on the vote slip that'd be great for auditing - but we don't because that would set the system up for some really horrible failures. The one that leaps to mind is "if you don't vote for me and I get in, I will do [insert blank] to you" strategies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot#Chronology_of_in...


“Literally zero make the voter’s vote public”

In most US states I can get a voter’s database and “party affiliation”. I was shocked that thus info is publicly available, and all the people’s addresses and driver’s license info are also stored there (and can be leaked)

And make no mistake, these databases are regularly leaked / hacked: https://qbix.com/blog/2023/06/12/no-way-to-prevent-this-says...

In fact there is a law for states to create and maintain this information. https://ballotpedia.org/Availability_of_state_voter_files

The “party affiliation” is a very good (around 95%) proxy to how they’re going to vote when they show up, as long as the two-party system dominates, which is why I say the whole “ability to prove your vote” thing is overblown, since your party affiliation at registration is already known, even publicly:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patte...

Explain how Estonia is able to reliably and securely do online elections, if only paper elections are secure:

https://e-estonia.com/how-did-estonia-carry-out-the-worlds-f...

Many times, people claim that technology would never be able to do a good job at what humans do manually — and almost always this has been proven wrong after a while: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...


If everyone got a unique prime number and a running total vote product was available, I always thought this would be a neat solution. Still susceptible to the goon-with-a-wrench technique I think


BLS signatures can provide similar properties

Crypto (by which I always mean cryptography) can help secure a lot of things that normally are just “trust in a middleman”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29306829


That doesn't sound like it secures anything. I can't verify that my prime number is unique (I vote for A. There is already a vote for A at 3. The machine logs a vote for B at 5 and reports to me my number is 3). So it'd be a scheme where nothing can be proved to me that I didn't already know. I still have to trust all the same middlemen, and I don't gain any knowledge about the integrity of an election.


> If everyone got a unique prime number


That is an unreasonable assumption, there isn't a secure way to issue everyone with a guaranteed unique prime. And even if there was, what is this system supposed to be doing? It doesn't secure anything and it doesn't enable any new knowledge that wasn't already available by just signing ballots with your name (which is a bad idea, so by comparison we might expect that this prime scheme is also a bad idea). Are you sure that is an interesting thread to pull? It doesn't look at all promising to me.


It is absolutely 100% not overblown. Voter punishment and suppression is a well established practice in many places. India's vote tallies for example have evolved to a pretty complicated system, because local powers were even instituting collective punishment on whole villages if they voted "badly". So, the vote counting system had to be adjusted to extend vote secrecy not just to the personal vote, but even to entire counties.

This is a very real problem with a well known history. Even in the USA, gerrymandering is facilitated by this kind of information. If votes were mixed during counting so that you didn't have information about vote counts in each polling place, it would have been considerably harder to come up with the crazy districts being used today in many places. Having personal identification of each voter would definitely have creative uses as well.

And as for bribing, in this very election we have Elon Musk publicly announcing he's giving out money to people who essentially pledge to vote (with some attempts at plausible deniability for committing this federal crime). I'm sure smaller and less loud election influencing is being attempted all the time - but it's hard to do if people can outright scam you and vote differently than what you paid them. Having an online proof of your vote would open up the floodgates to this at a massive scale. And there are plenty of people poor enough to see this as a lifeline.


> But honestly, I think the whole idea of being able to prove how you voted being dangerous is overblown.

Well you’re wrong.


Okay. People wrong about not needing voter ID.

Simple. They’re wrong.


People who want voter ID are wrong because they ignore the racist history of using voter ID requirements to disenfranchise voters and/or don’t understand how voter registration or ballot tracking work.

Voter ID is simply not something that will add security to the voting process but it will disenfranchise voters.

ID is already verified when registering and names are recorded when submitting ballots. Anyone seeking to cast ballots in the name of registered non-voters would need an army of individuals that won’t be recognized by poll workers and perfect knowledge of who is registered and not voting.

If a single registered voter name tries to cast two ballots that will trigger an investigation that will unravel the conspiracy. It doesn’t scale. It’s a problem made up by people who want to disenfranchise voters and is eaten up because it sounds “common sense”.

People who don’t think anonymity in voting is important lack imagination and historical knowledge. Fear of retaliation from the government, political fanatics, your family, or friends is perfectly rational and is why voting must be anonymous. This is an especially reasonable concern in an election where one of the candidates refers to voters as “the enemy within”. Consider voting for a Communist when Senator McCarthy was on his witch hunts. People are right to be scared of retaliation.


Tons of other countries require voter ID. You could say they’re all just being racist or whatever. But that wasn’t my point.

My point was — when it comes to challenging things you agree with, you write long explanations with nuance.

But when it’s things you disagree with, you say they’re “simply wrong”. That’s what I was getting at.

You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approach isn’t very helpful or productive.


I’m not calling voter ID racist. I’m saying that in the United States it has an established history of being abused by racists to suppress minority votes. This is a verifiable fact. Look at the Voting Rights Act for proof.

> You need to have a consistent standard for discussion, and clearly the latter approach isn’t very helpful or productive.

And yet you just did what you accuse me of.


Yes I did it after you to mimic you and prove a point


Right, which is what I was doing to begin with. So I guess we’re both right.


Doesn't the Blockchain, by design, record what is entered into it? So couldn't someone then figure out how you voted?


(without making any claim about "block chains for voting are good/bad")

Not really. Generally if you want to privately check something like this, you encrypt it for the recipient (government), and sign it with something that only you know. So the contents are hidden from everyone and nobody knows anyone's signature, but you can prove that your item is in the list, unmodified, and is therefore counted.

And then the chain would provide a quick way to check for "has not been modified since I checked", without needing to do the full check again.


Traditionally, you would sign with the government’s public key so that only they can decrypt it. But ballots are so low entropy that I’d be worried about brute forcing it (maybe some significant nonces can be added?) a solution where you use the block chain signed with certificates held in a central database is just… another case of people pushing blockchain without understanding it


Nah, not a problem. You generate a random number R and encrypt R || V where V is your vote.

(Or, equivalently, use something like CBC mode with a random i.v.)


Assuming uncontrolled public access to the blockchain, couldn't this also be used to prove to others that you voted "correctly", facilitating vote buying schemes?


Particularly if you do not publicly disclose the cert you signed it with: I'd be willing to bet there's some way to make it so you can produce a signing cert that'll claim you filled in any data you wish.

E.g. have your signature data be a class of values based on vote possibilities, but have all produce the same final signature. You could produce anything for anyone that way. I'm not sure if that'd be "forward secrecy" or "deniable encryption" or what, but there are a variety of systems that do similar things.

I am not a cryptographer and I don't know any concrete implementations that would have all the properties I want, but pieces of pretty much all things you could reasonably want in a voting system do already exist. And pretty often they can be layered together. The bigger problems in practice seem to be "people won't trust it" (which is defensible), "some of the fancier crypto is too new and not thoroughly proven" (which is very true, e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), and "implementers so far have been stunningly incompetent" (undeniable).

(edit: or I guess more easily, just sign the data after encryption, and throw away your encryption key. then you can claim whatever you like - it's encrypted, they can't know, and you can still show that it wasn't changed)


Historically, you open the box and count them in front of anyone who wants to watch — using enough polling sites that’s a relatively short task at each.

Moving ballots, machine counting, etc are all relatively modern inventions — and seem to greatly weaken the consensus mechanism for little benefit.


In traditional voting, the votes get counted by humans, supervised by other humans. If you want to spend the time and energy, you can be one of those humans.

It's completely different from a machine count. Humans have human failure modes, which are easily accounted for. Machines have random failure modes, and complex ways of being attacked. And all of the machines can be wrong in one direction at the same time, which is impossible for human counters.

Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.


>Even random spot checks don't work for machines if the machine has some way of detecting it is being checked.

That's theoretically a possibility, but it's trivially defeated by choosing which ballot boxes to spot check after the machines have finished counting.


Fair enough, but there is also another problem. What happens if you detect a discrepancy in one or two places, but good results in many others? Do you still issue a full recount of all places that the machine was used? If not, then an adversary can still subtly modify the results of the election, at least probabilistically.


The actual ballots are stored, a selective audit is done to verify the electronic count, and in the event that raises issues a full manual recount can be done.

The electronic voting system issues in the 2000 elections motivated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 under which voter-verified paper records for audit purpose required for all voting machines (this requirement became effective in 2006); effectively, “voting machines” add ballot marking machines that may also be involved in convenience tabulation, but are always audited against hand counts of paper ballots, which are the ultimate authority.


The idea is that the machine just provides a preliminary count, a official manual count happens over the following several hours. If there's a discrepancy then the only the manual count counts and the machine can be identified as problematic.


No manual count happens unless the results of the election are in question (very close race, evidence of impropriety, etc.)


Selective audits are standard practice though, where issues can trigger a broade r manual recount


> Where am I technically wrong here? I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

As I understand that article, BIOS access requires two passwords, and the list only provides one of the two passwords. So, instead of "password list" I would say "partial-password list".

The list also misses "There is 24/7 video camera recording on all election equipment." Of course, you can raise concerns and failure modes about video recordings, but that all brings up the question "Were those recordings compromised?" You should not assume that they were.


CO resident here.

CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night.

My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that is what the machines in question are responsible for.

* for some definition of "everyone"


An interesting aside:

I’m an overseas Colorado voter. They lump me in with the military voters so my voting process is super easy (I’m sure certain groups would love to make this harder, but not for the troops). I get an email that my ballot is ready, I go to the CO website, authenticate with my SSN (fucking yikes), fill out my ballot online, print a copy to pdf, slap a digital signature on there, and email it back to the SOS who presumably prints it out and throws it in with the rest, and then get an email saying my vote has been counted.

It’s amazing how easy voting can be when we want it to be.


When you disregard basic voting security, everything becomes super easy. Mail-in voting allows for vote buying, the only way to avoid this is by having a private in person voting booth so the person voting cannot prove to the outside world who they voted for.

Even this isn't secure now, because everyone can just photograph their voting card within the booth.


After your very last sentence, I’m not even sure what your point is here. You just listed a bunch of reasons you don’t think mail in ballots are safe, and then ended with saying the alternative also isn’t safe from vote buying.

Vote buying also does not appear to be a problem in the US electoral system, as another commented pointed out: in order to make a difference in the election, you’d have to buy enough votes that someone would be bound to tell on you.


Yea no, I get that, it's just that voting was still secure up until smartphones were ubiquitous. Now it's not.

It's not just about vote stealing per se, it's about any third party infraction of individual voting rights. It may not matter on a large scale, but it matters to individuals.

Not only that, but it matters that bosses can't coerce workers into voting for someone, or an abusive spouse, or any third party who might have an interest in swaying an election. It often doesn't take much to sway an election.

It becomes very problematic when a victim is unable to vote for someone who would stop abuse. For example, Russia decriminalizing spousal physical abuse. That same thing could happen anywhere, and then you'd have every asshole abuser at home forcing their family to vote for their choice.

Not having secure voting is a real problem, and one that is now unsolved thanks to smartphones.


Au contraire.

With my remote voting, I can generate as many ballots as I want. If I want to make a dummy ballot that says I voted for any given candidate in order to fool someone it is easier than ever. Now instead of 1 physical ballot, I can generate multiple ballots, and do as I please with them.


That's a different security issue, not related to voter coercion.

There are checks to ensure votes aren't fraudulent, that's actually very easy and already done. You can send as many ballots as you want, but they need to be legitimised against a person. That's not such an easy grift. I believe


Do you have any evidence this is happening? In order to swing an election, you'd have to buy a lot of votes. That's a lot of people to rat you out.

You're proposing that secret vote-buying conspiracy is going on and thousands of people are all keeping their mouth shut in order to keep getting that... $10, $50, $100 bribe?


I'm not proposing any of that. I'm just saying that voting isn't secure, and that has very real implications. See my other response for more detail.


Hehe you disproved your own claim. Mail-in voting does not “allow” vote buying any more than any other method of voting. It’s simply not possible for the voting system itself to prevent vote buying, if that were actually a serious problem. But where’s the evidence that vote buying is a widespread problem in the US? Imagining that something is possible doesn’t mean it’s happening, nor make it likely, nor make it a serious problem to solve. And on the flip side, the more technology we add in the name of security, the easier it is to influence elections without people knowing and without having to buy votes.

If you don’t want it to be possible for people to buy or sell votes, then you need to make sure every citizen is engaged and cares about casting their own vote, and you need to make sure the government has a stable and trustworthy system of checks and balances. And why not just make it illegal with massive fines to buy votes and post a huge bounty for anyone tattling on a vote buyer that gets prosecuted? It doesn’t seem that complicated to disincentivize vote buying in a way that eliminates any concerns about the method of voting.

Oh, hey, look: vote buying is already illegal in the US. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597


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> You would think AI/ML could help with fraud detection.

I think that's a very big leap to make, that the ballots are going to where they're going because of fraud. Hanlon's razor applies.

> ballot box stuffing

Ballot-box stuffing happens when more ballots are cast than there are people who voted. This is difficult to do when voting by mail. Indeed, from the article:

> LeVan Hodson told KING 5, "Even if someone gets a second ballot (or more), whether under their name or someone else’s, we’ll only ever count one ballot per registered voter with their matching signature."

When you receive the envelope, you check the signature against what's on file. You also check records to see if the voter had voted elsewhere (such as at an early-voting location). You can check to see if the voter reported not receiving their mail-in ballot. You can do all these checks before opening the envelope. And once you do open the envelope, it's easy to see if multiple ballots had been included in the envelope.


The signature on my voting registration is the one I used when I first registered 40 years ago when I was still in high school. It’s quite different from my signature today, and it’s never been challenged.


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Or they work at an old folks home.


Ah: turns out it was a postman.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/02/nx-s1-5174151/election-2024-v...

> County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster, doing his job. After the video went online, he began receiving threats.


Once you look past individual anecdotes, the actual rate of voter fraud with mail voting is tiny compared to the voting population. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/minuscule-number-of-...


Because of how the electoral college works, and because of how tight the margins are, you don't need to have or enable fraud on a massive scale to cheat. All that's needed is putting your thumb on the scale in a few select jurisdictions and that could tip the scales one way or the other. It's within the realm of probability that the presidential election will be decided by < 50k voters nationwide.


Yep.

But you have to know which 50k voters in which state, and be able to put your thumb on the scales without tipping off the dozens of people who are professionally employed to prevent exactly this scenario.

More than a few people have been caught trying to cast just a single extra vote.

How in the world are you going to pull off a massive conspiracy like in the midst of the most scrutinized election in the world.


>Once you look past individual anecdotes, the actual rate of voter fraud with mail voting is tiny compared to the voting population. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/minuscule-number-of-...

that's hardly reassuring given how close this election is going predicted to be.

>The median scenario from our forecast has Ms Harris winning her pivotal 270th electoral-college vote by less than half a percentage point.

https://archive.is/uk388

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/31/what-to-w...


Half a percentage point is orders of magnitude bigger than a 0.0025% fraud rate.


That fraud rate is obviously wrong:

There’s more than 4000 questionable ballots in the entire US election.


>There’s more than 4000 questionable ballots in the entire US election.

source? The most I can find is this: https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/4-000-mail-in-voters-...

which provides no information for why the ballots were "questionable".


Another example of "Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works."[0]

Mailed ballots are verified against voter registrations and signatures are checked against the signature on file. This woman with a bunch of ballots for former residents of her apartment would gain essentially nothing and open herself to serious criminal penalties if she tried to vote as anyone except herself.

[0] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-electi...


The article you cite says nothing in direct response to the parent comment (ballot harvesting, etc.).

It also includes some misinformation, saying " signature verification is a critical part of ensuring that only valid ballots from eligible voters get counted" ... while many states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, do not verify signatures.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-14-how-st...

Another example of "Nothing looks suspicious when your eyes are closed"?


In texas you pick your items on computer and it spits out a paper ballot that you can look at to verify it's what you voted for. The info is also included in a qr code like form for a reader. In the event that something looks off it can be verified by humans. I figured something similar was done all over.


This is not the case everywhere in Texas. In many places, you fill in a paper ballot at a booth and feed it into a machine at the end with nothing printed afterwards.


Here is a video explaining Colorado's voting system:

https://vimeo.com/842943160

It has a surprisingly(?) low view count for how riled up everyone is about all this.

If you want more insight into this system, here is a test plan from August of this year on the Election Assistance Commission's website:

https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/ClearVote%20...

It also has a list of bug fixes like:

> Changed the ClearCount API to require authentication before uploading files (such as ballot images and tabulation results) to the server.

And software details like:

- MySQL 8

- Ubuntu 20

- Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021

- Windows Enterprise IoT 21H2 release

- Python 3

- CIS SCAP Ubuntu 20.04 revision 1.1.0

Here is a summary of an audit done on a previous version last year:

https://elections.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/10/clea...


It is important that the voting system have credibility for everyone - regardless of party. Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint? It would be great to offer voters verification of their votes while maintaining secrecy.

But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the country having doubts about the process and the other half insisting that it is absolutely perfect. It isn’t enough for the process to be either correct or trustworthy. It has to be both.


> But right now I feel like we are stuck, with one half the country having doubts about the process and the other half insisting that it is absolutely perfect.

It's not correct that one half of the US insists that the election process is absolutely perfect. There have been countless investigations, inquiries etc. and the process is being continuously reviewed. One half of the US insists that the process shouldn't be changed to the detriment of minority groups without any actual evidence that problems exist (as the investigations etc. did not result in such evidence), yet the other half still insists that the problems occur and the evidence is just hidden too well, and the process must be changed without ensuring that minority groups aren't affected more than other groups.

This is not a situation with two equal sides.


> One half of the US insists that the process shouldn't be changed to the detriment of minority groups

This trope that minorities are affected by voter ID laws doesn’t pass the slightest scrutiny. It’s also just plainly offensive and racist to assume minorities can’t show the basic competency to obtain ID when you already need it for so many things. Where were these complaints when everyone, including minorities, had to show documentation around their vaccination status for various things? Why isn’t this issue in every other country that does require ID to vote in elections?

> without any actual evidence that problems exist (as the investigations etc. did not result in such evidence)

A system not designed to generate data for such investigations will not turn up evidence. Just like with poorly designed software systems.


> This trope that minorities are affected by voter ID laws doesn’t pass the slightest scrutiny.

It is well-supported by actual research (e.g. [1]) AND by simple logic. Every single point you brought up has a clear counter argument - why didn't you respond to any of them? Have you simply never heard anyone mention them?

> It’s also just plainly offensive and racist to assume minorities can’t show the basic competency to obtain ID when you already need it for so many things.

It's plainly offensive and racist to ignore studies (e.g. [2]) that prove a higher percentage of minorities owns government issued photo ID compared to non-minorities. I'm not assuming anything, I'm only looking at statistics, at real people and data. You're instead attempting to move the conversation away from data.

> Where were these complaints when everyone, including minorities, had to show documentation around their vaccination status for various things?

First, such complaints did exist back then as well. Second, both vaccination and frequent testing were subsidized by the government, with extra investments towards minorities. Why don't advocates of voter ID ever make similar suggestions? Why not propose a program that allows any minority to acquire a government ID without any downsides, and once that's done propose voter ID?

> Why isn’t this issue in every other country that does require ID to vote in elections?

Because in pretty much every other developed country:

- there exist standardized, government issued IDs that are distributed to every citizen during normal government interactions (e.g. in Germany you must own government ID)

- poor people (a group that minorities make up a disproportionately large part of) have more free time and are in far less precarious positions regarding job security, and consequently health care

- poor people have a far easier time getting to government buildings (e.g. cities are less car-reliant, better public transport, better coverage of government buildings)

The US is in a very different position compared to most other countries. It’s just plainly offensive and racist to introduce additional barriers to basic rights while fully aware that the average person from minority groups will have to spend more time and effort to clear them.

I'm not going to spend time digging up research for every claim I've made unless you're willing to do the same for your positions. But since you've now been made aware that this "trope" does pass the slightest scrutiny, I'm looking forward to your response! Just to summarize, you'll have to explain how the disparate impact of additional barriers to voting isn't "plainly offensive and racist" given that:

- non-minorities are much more likely to own a government ID than minorities

- non-minorities on average have an easier time acquiring such ID

- non-minorities on average face fewer potential repercussions regarding work and health care acquiring such ID

[1] http://ippsr.msu.edu/research/voter-identification-laws-and-...

[2] https://www.voteriders.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDCE_V...


I certainly don’t think we should restrict voting to landowners but maybe having a minimum requirement for citizens to participate in democracy (having an ID) isn’t a bad thing.

I think the concern with not requiring ID is that it could allow non-citizens to vote. Making it illegal for non-citizens to vote also disproportionately affects minorities, but that doesn’t justify changing that.

Do you know any minorities personally who have struggled to get an ID? Most minorities I know would be pretty offended by that implication.


> I certainly don’t think we should restrict voting to landowners but maybe having a minimum requirement for citizens to participate in democracy (having an ID) isn’t a bad thing.

Come on, you can't mean this in good faith as a response to my previous comment. It's a fact that minorities are less likely to have government ID, and that it's on average harder for them to acquire it. This is not "a minimum requirement", this is a requirement that - in the current system - deliberately shifts power by disenfranchising voters.

> I think the concern with not requiring ID is that it could allow non-citizens to vote. Making it illegal for non-citizens to vote also disproportionately affects minorities, but that doesn’t justify changing that.

It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, but I'm sure you know that. You also know that there is no comparison between the two things.

The worst part is: non-citizens voting would be a valid concern if there were any evidence for this happening beyond a handful of cases per election. But there isn't, because non-citizens generally don't want to risk being caught for one single additional vote. And it's not for a lack of looking - the GOP has spent millions upon millions of dollars to find anything, and they have not been able to procure evidence of non-citizens voting in any meaningful capacity. Yet apparently the rules must be changed anyway, no matter the cost to democracy.

> Do you know any minorities personally who have struggled to get an ID? Most minorities I know would be pretty offended by that implication.

Do you have anything meaningful to contribute to this discussion? Any response to any of the points I've already brought up? I don't need to bring up anecdotal evidence when this topic has been broadly researched, and basic logic leads to the same inevitable conclusion.


> Come on, you can't mean this in good faith as a response to my previous comment.

I sincerely do, I don’t know what else to tell you.

> It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

In many states, non citizens can vote in state or municipal elections just not the federal. In states without Voter ID, a non citizen could easily register with an electric bill. It would be illegal, but it would be very hard to prosecute.

> Do you have anything meaningful to contribute to this discussion?

I think you bring up great points in a challenging and partisan topic. I’m just outlining some of the concerns that people have with not requiring Voter ID. You can dismiss them as invalid if you want! But I think you would have more luck trying to prevent the disenfranchisement of minorities if you wouldn’t dismiss all of these concerns out of hand.

Again, you’ve made a fairly strong case that voter ID disproportionately affects minorities, but you haven’t made the case that wide swaths of voting citizens are actually disenfranchised, nor have you made an argument that justifies abandoning the concept of election security altogether.


> In many states, non citizens can vote in state or municipal elections just not the federal. In states without Voter ID, a non citizen could easily register with an electric bill. It would be illegal, but it would be very hard to prosecute.

Let's play this scenario through. You're a non-citizen and risk being found by registering to vote. You get a provisional ballot (since you can't have registered properly before, as that would have been validated and found). This provisional ballot will be counted once your registration is validated, which it won't be, since you're a non-citizen. So what is the exact danger here?

> I think you bring up great points in a challenging and partisan topic. I’m just outlining some of the concerns that people have with not requiring Voter ID. You can dismiss them as invalid if you want! But I think you would have more luck trying to prevent the disenfranchisement of minorities if you wouldn’t dismiss all of these concerns out of hand.

Thanks, but I'm not dismissing them out of hand, I'm asking for evidence that these things actually happen. If that evidence exists I'll gladly agree that election security must be improved.

> Again, you’ve made a fairly strong case that voter ID disproportionately affects minorities, but you haven’t made the case that wide swaths of voting citizens are actually disenfranchised, nor have you made an argument that justifies abandoning the concept of election security altogether.

Of course I haven't made an argument that justifies abandoning the concept of election security altogether, because who would want that? I want elections to be secure, just like everyone else.

I think I've made a pretty good case that enough voting citizens would be disenfranchised. Why does it have to be wide swaths? Why should you be allowed to disenfranchise even a small percentage of voters, even though you have no evidence that your security concerns are actual issues?


Paper ballots are standard and the majority of states require ID to vote.

There was someone using the Michigan voter file (which has a line in it for each change to the voters record, so repeats voters) to claim that someone was voting dozens of times. They weren't airing a legitimate concern about the voting system, they were sowing discord by lying about how it works.

Your framing of the situation is reductive and cartoonish.


> Has anyone done a ground up exercise of rethinking the process and the involved technologies from a cybersecurity standpoint?

Chesterton’s fence.


I take it that you mean that before you tear down this system, understand why it is the way it is. And, yeah, sure. I don't think that invalidates reimagining the solution from what may be new/updated first principles.


This feels a lot like the people who simply tell others to become a poll worker when they start asking hard questions about the system. I get the wisdom in this but it can also be a waste of time. In other (non electoral) situations, many big improvements can and have happened without needing to endlessly understand existing things.

In this case it is clear we don’t have verifiable elections - you don’t need to understand anything deeply to know this, since it is apparent with your own ballot. So instead let’s design for something better.


> you don’t need to understand anything deeply to know this, since it is apparent with your own ballot

Are you giving up the secret ballot in your scheme?


Here’s a telling interview by someone doing journalism rather than running cover: https://youtu.be/NLi-0WI-f7M?si=o8qktF4d25E3oJ-s

It’s interesting that she made excuses for herself but previously had no quarter for someone who landed in similar position.


It's only interesting when you oversimplify the two situations for the express purpose of sowing distrust.

The only reason you've left out the details that Tina Peters actually facilitated physical access to voting machines with both required passwords, while this current leak was not even sufficient for someone to repeat Peters' actions, is that it would be absolutely devastating to your entire argument.


[flagged]


Virality is not an indicator of accuracy or authority. Do you dispute this?


I don’t understand your comment.

Are you claiming that the video is fake? — if not, what’s your comment referring to with “accuracy”? — how is “authority” relevant at all, when discussing video of a malfunction?


Provably digitally altered fake videos of voter fraud were made and disseminated by Russia during the US 2020 election. Non-partisan institutions put a lot of energy in trying to debunk these operations which basically suit America's adversaries and, absent of critical thinking, many people become unwitting participants in their disinformation campaigns.

By eating away at the trust of non-partisan institutions that are established to maintain free and fair elections, autocracies like Russia, Iran, China, etc., move up in the world at the expense of internal divisions in the US.


You're comparing apples and oranges in an attempt to distract from the topic by invoking the Russian disinformation trope.

The video is provably authentic, and it elicited an official response from the local government. End of story.

By your logic, if it appears on social media at all, it never happened.


No, I’m explaining the need for critical thinking, not that all stories of voter fraud/manipulation are immediately bunk. The default of credulity is much more troublesome as it allows for misinformation to be promulgated and be given unearned credence - it gives adversarial actors ‘authority’ one might say. It’s also important to note that in terms of actual fraud, audits and challenges from 2020 show that the system works, contrary to widespread public outrage on the issue


There's nothing about my question to misunderstand. Are you troubled at the prospect of answering it?


Those aren't used in Colorado, so what's the relevance?


[flagged]


There’s videos of it malfunctioning.

Eg, https://x.com/DawnLisArmy/status/1852010240343982167

Telling people to “shut the fuck up” about documented voting irregularities is how civil wars actually start — because it causes people to lose confidence in the electoral process.

We should use our words, like adults.


[flagged]


[flagged]


My point is “video of thing happening on social” media is worth essentially nothing these days


Yeah, if it is a problem then the person that cannot vote for their intended candidate (I presume it's a two step process - select, then confirm) should flag it up at the officials and the machines shut down / replaced / fixed and its manufacturer shitcanned. There's procedures for this, and instead of ragebaiting on social media there should be a firm and conclusive response.

Nothing wrong with paper votes.


They tried.

Officials only pulled the machine once it went viral on social media — because the state regularly suppresses and ignores citizen concerns.

Political parties use social media to detect and focus their efforts — eg, where voters were turned away in PA, videos of that on social media drew enough attention the RNC sued and won an order forcing the polling places to remain open for longer.

Why do people act like social media isn’t a relevant form of communication and organization?


Which do you suppose is more likely...

A) There was a voting machine that had a miscalibrated touchscreen that will be corrected before election day.

B) An evil democrat conspiracy is going to steal the election in Kentucky


Are you saying the video was made by an election worker prepping machines in a back room?

These were deployed machines used in early voting. The amount of willingness to excuse incompetency here is unbelievable.


Incompetence is not malice. I just googled for more info: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/1...

> Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown addressed the issue in a statement, saying the machine was temporarily taken out of service while an investigator from the Attorney General's Office was called to inspect the machine. Investigators tried to recreate the anomaly and were able to do so after spending few minutes tapping in the area of the screen between the Trump and Harris field, Brown said.

> Despite additional attempts, Brown said investigators weren't able to recreate it a second time.

> "The Kentucky Attorney General’s Department of Criminal Investigations quickly responded to the complaint from Laurel County. Detectives have been in touch with the county clerk and recommended they change out the voting machine," Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said in a statement. "All Kentucky voters can have confidence that our elections are secure and any potential issues will be addressed quickly."

> In a statement Friday, officials from the Kentucky State Board of Elections said the voting machine registered the selection for Harris because the voter was touching two boxes simultaneously.

> Initially, the voter used their finger to "jab" the small box in the top-left corner of the Trump field on the touchscreen. After a few failed attempts, a second hand enters the frame and is seen attempting to "simultaneously click the large Trump field with an index finger and the large Robert F. Kennedy field with a thumb, leaving the Harris box highlighted," officials said.

> Michon Lindstrom, spokesperson for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, also dismissed the incident as "voter error."

> Brown emphasized that the issue occurred on a ballot-marking machine, which does not process votes. Marking machines allow voters to make their selections for their ballot and then physically print them to be cast and counted.

> If the machine prints a faulty ballot, voters are able to discard it and print a corrected one, Brown said.


> Marking machines allow voters to make their selections for their ballot and then physically print them to be cast and counted.

As someone not from the US: Why do you need that? What’s the advantage over manually filling out a piece of paper? The machine can’t use the data of printed ballots for anything if I can print multiple ballots, so it’s just a glorified pen making a checkmark?


It limits the user error pens cause. You can look up old disputed ballots, many of them are things like; people sloppily starting to fill out A then realizing they really want B, making such a large checkmark that it covers A and part of B, or those pranksters that fully color in A B and C.

As this shows, it still allows some user error, but they hope for less.


I would just like to say, thank you for doing the work of locating a news post about the situation. That really helps ensure we are talking about the same thing. And it allows us to review the situation ourselves.


Ah, the tried and true "you're holding it wrong" excuse.

Is it safe to admit the voting machine UX sucks if this is remotely possible? These things should be designed so 90 year olds can use them without error - and without filing their fingertips down with little squares of sandpaper.


There's a pretty wide range of possibilities between "videos were all faked because this is the most secure election in history" and "let's not take the video at face value and await further verification because it's election season and there's plenty of bad actors trying to sow distrust in the election system by posting misleading/manipulated videos".


The implication of the videos was that this was malice (and that generates clicks) yet if you read between the lines, it's simply incompetency - uncalibrated touchscreens.

My point is local jurisdictions do not have the knowledge or resources to properly maintain or deal with electronic voting machines (of which there appears to be no national standard) and maintain integrity. If they can't remember to perform basic maintenance like calibrate the screens, what other steps are missed or ignored?


Computers anywhere in the vote casting process introduce new, additional failure modes. These modes may be intentional (hacking) or unintentional (misconfiguring the paper size of the ballots). They may be mundane (power failure, out of ink) or esoteric (logic error). Even computerized counting has a nonzero error rate (so does human counting, but that can be challenged by human observers).

Computers add cost for acquiring the computers and training the staff. Computers add complexity and complexity usually reduces the reliability of a process. In a process like voting, that also reduces confidence in the process. This and the cost alone make it unclear why anyone would want to spend the money to electronicize vote casting and counting.

People have been voting without benefit of electronics for thousands of years.

In the vast majority of countries where paper ballots are used and counted by hand, the count is almost invariably completed the day of the election.

Conversely, in the US, where we spend lots of money to acquire, maintain and operate computers to “assist” in voting and vote counting, now we have many jurisdictions who say that they cannot complete counting on Election Day.

It boggles my mind that anyone still supports involving computers in vote casting and counting.


It's important to recognize that the US system involves many more races and questions on the ballot than in other (especially parliamentary) systems. Electronic-free counting in many states would significantly extend counting times; many voters have 20+ choices to make, and each of these choices would have to be counted and tracked, which introduces failure modes of their own.

Counting by hand makes sense when each ballot paper has one race; when each ballot has 25 items, using robust optical scan systems common in testing makes sense. Electronic systems also open new options for improved accessibility, as long as all systems produce a physical record, ideally that is counted as itself, rather than a receipt for an electronic count.


- Counting machines should print on each ballot the running count for each race at the point that it counted that ballot. This would allow for manual sampling of N pairs of consecutive ballots to check that the counts never differ by more than one, and never by less than zero.

- Counting machines should be dead simple, and should be one per ballot style. We should go back to precinct-only voting and forget county-wide voting.

- Reconciliation is an absolute must -- as it's always been, but we seem to have stopped doing it in many places.

- Every day of early voting should be treated like election day: with results published for each day. This would reduce the risk of ballot stuffing after hours because one the ballots are counted for the day there are no ballot boxes to stuff.


I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention.

Parliamentary systems are the only democratic systems I’m aware of that ever features more than 2 parties in a FPTP system as well.


It's not just about candidates for positions. I live in Colorado which allows citizen ballot initiatives and it's allowed us to reject actions of the government the populace disagrees with or to enact change they refuse to. A few notable examples are rejecting the 1976 winter Olympics from being hosted in Denver and the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana. Our ballots tend to be large and all citizens are mailed out what is know as "the blue book" months before the election which is a comprehensive guide to all the non-candidate questions including pros/cons and financial breakdowns. Between this and all-mail voting, we had the second highest voter turnout in 2020 and an extremely political engaged and knowledgeable electorate. I definitely would not trade it for less say in the political process.


If you’re talking about minor elected offices (Clerk of Deeds, etc.) be careful what you wish for.

I lived in a country which did away with many of the small elections, only to have the positions filled by toxic empire-builders.

We went back to elections, where a scandal was handled by electors, not union rules.

Parliamentary democracies are usually accompanied by competent, autonomous civil services. That’s not something America has.


> accompanied by competent, autonomous civil services. That’s not something America has.

That's a bold claim. The federal system can be incompetent and isn't autonomous. But lower level local ones tend to be especially if far away from politically contentious topics until you get to counties that are really small. Representative elections are both about accountability and about representation so I don't have to worry about minutia. As long as rules are followed and you have systems that remove influence peddling (not so much appointments as above-board job interviews with many candidates), then you can let failing to follow such rules be a scandal that takes out the politician that tried to corrupt the system.


Or we could have more elections, with each focusing on a specific topic. The biggest advantages here are that you only have to vote in elections you care about and that the more we exercise a process the better we get at it. Of course the time burden on voters is greater.

Or we could invert a lot of the races. I am college educated but never involved in law, how can I reasonably pick a judge or DA? What I want is my representatives to choose one, and then have a very low threshold for a special election to fire (“recall”) the person if they do a bad job. And only need that because my representatives have shown that they won’t.

Any sort of non-in-person voting is a security nightmare. But I am very sympathetic to the people who want to make it easier. I think we should vote on a Saturday or Sunday instead of a weekday, we should make it a federal holiday in order to close as many businesses as possible, and I think that employers who stay open should be required to give paid time off to vote, that doesn’t count against vacation or sick leave.


Re: FPTP vs ranked choice/condorcet/instant runoff/etc

In US elections, any alternative voting system would essentially require computers. With all the complexity, problems and mistrust that they bring. Also those alternative systems are subject to gamification as shown in recent elections in Alaska and France. No fraud or illegality, but the will of the people was arguably thwarted by introduction of confounding candidates.

Re: parliamentary vs US representation

US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.

The US was not supposed to be one big country with uniform laws. It was supposed to be N number of mostly independent states with a common currency + a common defense + a safeguards against states taking advantage of each other. The basic assumption is that most laws are not one-size-fits-all, and that each state should be largely autonomous and figure out the laws that work best for that state’s citizens.

The more people you try to put under the same set of laws, the more likely it is that the weak will be taken advantage of by the strong. Take California water management- the populous cities, in true democratic fashion, determine what farmers can do with the water on and under their land, and special interests can contribute to campaigns for favor and end up getting water rights to water on your land, because democracy!

But all these are the “why” of the US election system, which is kinda orthogonal to how we vote and count.


> US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.

That's a pretty rose-tinted description. The 17th amendment came about because the Senate was cartoonishly corrupt under the previous system. It should tell you something that it was ratified by the very state legislatures whose power it diminished.


I think getting rid of the Senate and increasing the number of seats in the house is an instant remedy to many ills in the political system.


I find it interesting that all the countries that the US "helped" to democratize all end up with a parliamentary system instead of the US system. Unfortunately I suspect the US is just stuck with it.


I find it very funny that in star trek, the orwell, star wars; the governing body has always 2 aliens per race because you have that weird 2 people from every state… so naturally the whole multiverse must be governed by the same absurd system :D


> Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates.

You can say this with a straight face about the presidential election because it's a statistical tie. But it's laughable at the municipal/county level. Even at the state level it's often not true-- e.g., in Ohio were savvy enough to reject a marijuana legalization referendum (which they overwhelmingly wanted!) because it would have given a tiny cartel control over growing it. That caveat wasn't in the text of the referendum IIRC, so somehow a majority of Ohioans defeated it using their "absolutely zero knowledge" of the inner workings of that proposed law.

> So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out.

There's a human web of trust lots of voters use to navigate the complexity of voting. The more local you get the more effective it is. At the municipal level there's a chance you're web includes the people directly involved in an issue, in addition to people who can help you judge the veracity of those people!

> And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention.

Sounds like you're hedging here-- what exactly does "give the power to" mean? If you're saying that special interests have more power to slip in corrupting legislation or install lackeys during an off-year, that's definitely not true. The worst stuff gets passed through when there's a lot of noise to cover it-- like presidential elections or national disasters.


scanned paper ballots. simple, fast, auditable. humans are WAY more error prone than computers at counting.


Seriously. The amount of suspicion for computerized scanning and counting systems here is surprising.

I realize state of the art, modern, high-performance systems are incredibly complex... but that doesn't mean all systems have to be incredibly complex.

Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans.

And critically, it's feasible to perform attestation on electronic systems: something that's completely impossible with humans. You have no idea if Joe or Sally are randomly slipping in a few miscounts (or the people auditing them, or the people auditing them). If you're careful, you can be sure that only specific code is executing.

I'd be fascinated to get a breakdown of trust in computerized voting systems, from programming professionals, by programming speciality. I have a suspicion you'd get different answers from firmware/RT folks vs js front-end, to pick a couple of examples.


> Simple computerized systems are incredibly accurate and reliable, easily moreso than humans.

Such systems are better enough that businesses handling cash use them to count paper money.

Next to voting, or perhaps ahead of it, people surely value reliable accuracy in their money. So why not ballots?


Because the current implementations for ballots don't feel up to snuff, and I at least don't trust profit-driven companies to make "simple computerized systems" that are auditable and whatnot. Get a good solution in place for many election cycles and then we can all be happy.


With encryption/hashing, maybe requiring some of that "process encrypted data without decrypting the data" fancy papers from a year or two ago that I never understood, can't we do some basic anti-fraud measures?

Sure, we use a computer to produce a paper ballot (computers DON'T count or keep counts). The voter has a voting id that is hashed/encrypted/processed in such a way that the number is verifiable as a valid ballot hash (maybe using some sort of public/private key pair) so hashes can't simply be randomly generated.

So the computer UI produces the ballot. The voter is told to check their ballot reflects what they wanted to vote for. The ballot is scanned with a scantron.


Not sure if this is a "thing" or if there's a problem with it, but why not live-stream video of every vote being counted so the entire population could validate at least the counting portion of voting.


so then the attack becomes introducing enough error at critical counts such that it affects the result without being regarded as having been tampered with

pretty easy if your company produced the machines


Random audits can generally solve this. Take a random count from a random machine and validate that it matches the hand count. If I’m trying to rig an election I would have to be very reckless to just cross my fingers and hope that the systems I hacked aren’t audited. I’d have to bribe the auditors or something, and at that point it’s simpler to just bribe people anyway and not bother with the whole hacking part.


How would this defeat doing a statistical hand sampling of the ballots to verify the electronic counting is accurate?


what's the failure point? then you work inside that

I know a guy who did this for a job for a company that produced food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign

his entire job was to allow the company to push up as close to that line as possible without going over when checked randomly

saving them tens of millions a year


Depends on how many ballots you sample, but the number you could change would only matter in an extremely close election and in my state, if a vote is within 0.5%, it triggers an automatic recount. These systems have layers of auditing and validation to prevent these errors whether intentional or not.


Scanned paper ballots are changed all the time -- the manufacturer doesn't know that row 2 option 1 is a particular candidate. Authorities aren't stupid and know to change the ballots and test the machines.

Teachers and students understand how this all works, so it has a lot of trust.


Why not use the Brazilian system? It's been working for a long time


I think all US folks reading this should volunteer at their county's Registrar of Voters (or equivalent agency for their county). Spend one election working at a polling place, and another election working at the RoV HQ. See what it's like to go through the training, and what things are like on Election Day, and in the days leading up (for places that allow early voting, drop-off, etc.).


To what end? Local to me, an “trained” election volunteer was still questioning voter’s citizenship at the polls.

I’d say this was a fluke if the GOP hadn’t spent the last umpteen months pushing all this non-citizen voting nonsense.

https://wapo.st/3AsIvnf


Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.


One person voting who is not allowed is as bad (in terms of fidelity of the vote to legal voters' intentions) as one person being kept from voting who is allowed. There is copious evidence that these purges, and the atmosphere of fear they create, cause far more harm than they prevent.


From one of the articles about what happened in Virginia[0]:

> “Governor Youngkin has been clear: every eligible Virginia citizen who wants to vote can do so by Same Day Registering through Election Day—that’s what our law says,” said Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez.

> A “final failsafe,” Martinez added, is the ability for residents to use same day registration to vote early or on Election Day.

[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/politics/us-citizens-caught-i...


I’m trying to think of this from the point of view of the “null hypothesis”. Typically, I have heard that you want to design your system so that Type II errors are more serious.

This is where it gets confusing for me because your comment makes me think that people can’t agree on whether it’s a more serious mistake to allow an ineligible person to vote or whether we end up stopping (hopefully temporarily) an eligible voter from exercising their right.


Maybe the best answer would be to just create a system where only people who are legally allowed to vote, and those that aren't allowed can't, and the provenance of any given ballot is very clear and secure.


Just make a system that works, why hadn’t anyone else thought of that?


Nobody wants that. The more mayhem, the easier it is to cheat. Same reason the U.S. has such a complicated tax code.


Sounds great. How do you do that?


It's hard to build it, but some countries (like mine) have universal government-issued IDs, called identity cards. You get your ID card when you turn 14 (voting starts at 18), based on your birth certificate, or when you become a legal citizen through immigration. This ID card includes a photograph, and has to be changed every ~10 years (slightly more often at first, slightly less often as you age). Whenever the government wants to confirm your identity, you present this card, including elections. On election day, if your ID card is lost/stolen, you can get one at any police station within the same day (if both your ID card and your birth certificate are also lost, however, that is going to take far more time to get back and get a new ID, and you will not be able to vote - which is a problem, but it affects very few people, fortunately).

This whole system is easy to maintain if you've had it in place. However, it's very hard to emit ID cards for a whole population that hasn't had one before. I'm not suggesting this is an easy fix for the USA, even beyond the cultural issues that would arise if trying to do a federal ID for every citizen like this.


Are we talking about "Voter ID"? If so, isn't that being constantly derailed by the democrats? Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.


> Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.

How do you reconcile that with:

Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos ( May 24, 2024 )

    Nearly every GOP senator, along with six Democrats, voted to filibuster a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on migration and reduce border crossings.

    The vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate Republican leaders insisted on a border security agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-seekers and tighten border controls.
~ multiple US news outlets.

FWiW I'm not American, and it seems pretty clear that US Republicans vastly overhype the risks associated with the southern border, campaign hard on fear mongering, and tank any efforts by the Democrats to address those problems.

Politically it's a common conservative tactic having been used in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere.

What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details.


That's the bill that would have facilitated illegal immigration, not stopped it. It sounds decent at first, providing a mechanism to lock down the border, but the "average of 4000 encounters" are 4000 who apply for asylum with a hearing at some future date and are released into the country in the meantime.


You really should read the bill. Our bills are never single subject and always have completely unrelated items in them. The title is also arbitrary marketing speak that is no indication of what the bill is intended to do.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...


Even more so we should use AI and probe the actual contents of these bills seeing as they're all-encompassing. This is like a giant PR that includes changes to 23% of your system, touching everything from every level including config files.

I'll bet money that none of the changes are grouped into any sort of easy-to-digest format with cross-referencing and other mechanisms to make it easy for people to introspect it.


As you are not an American, let me educate on what that bill did.

Much like the "Inflation Reduction Act" which was a clean energy bill that had nothing to do with inflation, the bill did the exact opposite of what it claimed.

- It funded billions of dollars for the NGOs which were aiding illegal immigration

- It normalized and allowed historically high illegal levels of immigration (10x normal)

- It removed the standard process for adjudicating asylum by judges and made it part of the federal ICE

- Required the US to fund lawyers for all people who were charged with illegal immigration (12 million in the last 4 years)

- It gave $60 billion to Ukraine, 3x more than border security [1]

- It gave $14 billion to Israel, $10B to Gaza, $2B for conflicts in the Red Sea, $4B to Taiwan

During this period where 12 million (3.4% of US population) people have crossed the border for residency illegally, many of which have been flown in by the US federal government, the federal government has sued Texas repeatedly while they are trying to build a border wall. They have flown in percentages of whole populations to US swing states to try to build voters. And illegal immigrants count in the census which determines US electoral votes.

The reason the GOP voted against it is because it was a wishlist for the Democratic party. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. If the GOP was such fear mongers, as you say, they'd vote for a bill that ameliorated their concerns.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-unveils-118-billi...


Not even 3 or 4 months ago, I would have expected the responses to this message to all be 'yassss queen slay', despite the glaring fact that the 'bi-partison' bill just enshrined the current democrat-party policy into law, while ensuring it could only be challenged in a court they control.

I am happy to see that the entirety of responses are effectively 'lol, actually read the law it is a disaster'.

My heart grew 1 size today.

"What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details." Pot, meet Kettle.


You mean the system we have already? The number of ineligible voters actively voting is inconsequential. Yes there are a few. Literally a few. It’s not the booger man the GOP would have is believe.


Atmosphere of fear? Hypobolic nonsense.


Virginia also purged my sister-in-law from the voter rolls, a naturalized citizen. Let's just say, I am not amused.


So is she unable to vote? Virginia has same day registration, so it would seem like a non-issue for a citizen.


In theory, yes, she can re-register at her polling place But that isn’t real-time - it’s a provisional ballot that gets certified later. This whole purge process (and related “citizen only” measures which are literally redundant) is designed to create friction and uncertainty among immigrant populations and marginally reduce their turnout.


I have to assume same day registration would require documentation to (re) prove your citizenship. If you can't find your birth certificate or similar on that day it would be an issue that your previously valid registration was removed and you aren't able to go through the process again in one day.


Typically not. Just an ID (depending on state, might require a photo, might not) and a sworn affidavit that you are eligible (ie a citizen, not a felon in some states, etc). The ballot would be provisional and the board of elections runs a more thorough check after the fact. The voter gets a phone number and transaction ID to check back to see their status.

But, as I've noted elsewhere, while this is an option in VA, it isn't in all states (the same-day reg part - they all have some form of provisional ballot). And it creates friction and uncertainty among the electorate. If your state sent you a letter that said you were ineligible, would you jump through hoops to prove them wrong, or would you punt this cycle and fix the issue later? The latter is what the GOP hopes will happen, effectively disenfranchising a specific group of left-leaning voters (most immigrant groups lean left to some extent).

Edit to add - states that have RealID implemented (not sure if they all do yet), all the paperwork required to get the RealID stamp on your DL would prove your citizenship as well, so that's on record with the state. In the case of the 1600 voters in VA, they all have pre-RealID licenses (and many have naturalized in the time since their DL was issued). But, quite a few were selected erroneously based on scant evidence.


It depends on the state but generally just requires proof of address or ID, I registered in Illinois with nothing but a phone bill.


Oh that's interesting. I don't remember the last time I had to register to vote but it was probably done at the DMV who would already have on record my birth certificate or similar.

If just an ID is used, how do they confirm someone is a citizen? Can you only get an Illinois ID if you are eligible to vote?


My experience is that in getting a state ID, you need birth certificate or another document.

In the case of a state without voter ID, there is no check — you literally just have to bring an electric bill. A non citizen could easily vote. It would be illegal, but the odds of being caught are slim to none.

If there was a suspicion that the voter was illegal, a poll worker could have them cast a provisional ballot. In places like California, it is a felony to require a provisional ballot without evidence.


Sounds like maybe it would be good to push for accurate voter rolls!


> Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.

Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen voting in VA.

As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check election day that was that wasn't already checked during registration. Asking me to "verify" day of, beyond what we already do, isn't really feasible.

Recommend you work the polls and educate yourself on how your particular locale operates.


This would be my expectation as well. Poll workers can verify that a person is registered to vote in this election, whether the registration was valid is an upstream problem.

If a state is allowing intelligible people to register to vote that's a much, much bigger issue and one that can't be solved by poll workers.


Understood. The point of verifying citizenship at the polls is a stop gap response to intelligible voters being on the rolls. The registration is broken. To ensure everybody is a legal voter something additional needs to be done until the rolls can be fixed.


1600 alleged non-citizens. There were absolutely citizens on the list.

And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal per federal statute.

Youngkin and the GOP are flat out wrong here. The courts have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox News.


And which is this mythical group of people that will be disenfranchised if the rule of showing photo id is implemented? How many US citizens don't have any form of valid id?


https://www.voteriders.org/analysis-millions-lack-voter-id/

~7 million with no ID ~29 million without an up-to-date DL


> To what end?

You'll know what to do.

I worked a total of eleven elections, from primarily elections to general elections. I even worked a special recall election where the recall was the only thing on the ballot. I was a volunteer for all of them. I worked as a "Polling Place Inspector", which means I was 'in charge' of a single polling place: I did the setup & teardown, reached out to the other polling place's poll workers to confirm they'll be there, and scheduled breaks etc..

I worked in Orange County, California, which is the county between Los Angeles and San Diego. At the time, it was very right-leaning. It may be so today, but that doesn't matter for this post.

Fun fact: In Orange County, poll workers are the only people who are allowed to question (or "challenge") a person's right to vote. The general public are not. How do I know that? Because it's one of the things I was taught during training. You can see it mentioned in [2], on page 11, under "What Are Observers NOT Allowed To Do?". (In the document, "precinct board" means "the poll workers".)

Now, three situational "pop quizzes" related to the situation from the article. In all three, you are a poll worker. Note that I will refer to procedures that were in place in Orange County, CA, not Fairfax County, VA:

Pop Quiz #1: Someone has arrived to vote, and you do not believe they are eligible to vote, what do you do?

Answer #1: You are challenging a voter. You have the voter vote provisionally. Their ballot would be sealed in the envelope, and their information (plus an explanation of why you're having them vote provisionally) would be on the envelope. The challenged voter would take a receipt with them, giving them a phone number to call, should they want to check up on the status of their vote after the election.

Fun Fact: Challenging a voter without probable cause is a felony in the State of California. How do I know that? Because it's in the instructional handbook that every poll worker gets, when they go through training. You can find Orange County's handbook for the 2018 election at [1].

Pop Quiz #2: Someone at the polling place, who is not a poll worker, is challenging peoples' right to vote. What do you do?

Answer #2: Call the dedicated polling place helpdesk, letting them know about the incident. Depending on the person's behavior, you may ask them to leave, or you may skip directly to calling the police. Your polling place inspector would have already looked up the phone number of the nearest police station, or you could just call 911.

Fun Fact: As part of polling place supplies, I received a county mobile phone. I was specifically instructed to charge it up in advance of election day. They were always chunky Nokia phones, which felt like they could be used as a weapon in an emergency.

Finally, to address your question…

Pop Quiz #3: Another poll worker is challenging a voter, and you believe the challenge is unlawful. What do you do?

Answer #3: If you are not able to dissuade the poll worker into allowing the voter to vote normally, then you have them vote provisionally. The most important thing is to get the voter through the process, and their provisional envelope into the box. Once that is done, you reach out to the polling place helpdesk, letting them know who did what.

Indeed, quoting from the article you linked, "After the [polling place] manager intervened, Burrell-Aldana was allowed to vote." The article does not say, but I expect the polling place manager was already planning on how to communicate the incident back to headquarters, and was keeping an eye on that poll worker.

If you had volunteered for this election, and you happened to be in the situation from this article, then you would have known what to do. :-)

[1]: https://ocvote.gov/fileadmin/user_upload/elections/gen2018/T...

[2]: https://ocvote.gov/election-library/docs/Election%20Observat...


My point was that despite all the training, some whack job was still allowed to work and question voters’ rights. How many did he successfully turn away? Hopefully none, but we don’t know.


I remember hearing polls workers saying "here comes another good republican". Next year they had monitors at the polls.


Except non-citizens have voted. And the Democrats found Virgina over removing confirmed non-citizens from the voter rolls. Why would anyone support keeping illegible voters on the rolls? We all know why.


Nobody is going to argue that non-citizens should be on the voter rolls. They are going to be upset if your method for taking them out is too coarse and removes legitimate voters, though.


Exactly.

Non-citizen voting is illegal already. We don’t need new laws re-banning it.

The numbers of non-citizens voting is small so any effort to purge them is as likely to disenfranchise legitimate voters as remove illegal voters. That’s a net negative.


> Nobody is going to argue that non-citizens should be on the voter rolls.

There are plenty of folks who think illegal aliens* should be allowed to vote.

* not sure what the political correct term is now tbh, double-plus-unnaturalized maybe, ha?


Those people think that they should be allowed to do so legally.


This is a very good suggestion. The internet discourse gets further and further from reality in a lot of areas. Engaging in the actual reality of the voting system is an excellent 'touch grass' opportunity for people passionate about the election.


>The internet discourse gets further and further from reality in a lot of areas

This is an intended feature, and it's exclusively a feature of one political party. The elections are always rigged, this one is rigged, the voting process is rigged, just don't ask me to present evidence in a court of law...


What are examples of things one might learn doing this?


Whether your local precinct uses paper ballots as suggested by the internet.


I did this (3 elections in a row from 2018-2020), and .... now I don't vote, because it became clear to me that the process is not trustworthy.


That seems like a massive waste of time and energy compared to just implementing mail in voting for everyone like Washington and Oregon have for so many years.


Washington and Oregon still need volunteers to monitor the drop boxes and retrieve, count, tabulate, and audit ballots.


Paper ballots have very boring failure modes and need no explanation or technical support.

When you see a system more complex than paper ballots, know that the additions are not there on your behalf.


I disagree. I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later. The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become. Recording votes in _both_ paper and electronic form allows for the auditability of paper and the speed of electronic calculations.

(Side note: I also believe that hand-counting of ballots can be tedious, and humans performing tedious, repetitive tasks are prone to error. See [1].)

[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...


> I believe there are people who want results sooner rather than later

In Denmark all ballots are hand-counted. It takes about 6 hours from polls close to every precinct reporting a preliminary result. Wanting it faster isn't really necessary, other than to feed the 24/7 news machine.


Denmark has a smaller population than New York City, America is a very large place.


Italy has 60M people and paper ballots, results are out the next day. Population does not matter since polling stations can be scaled up proportionally.

I've been in voting where we had a dozen ballots per person (referendums) so this would be more than the total paper ballots in the US, it works fine.

Minor miscounts happen but nobody has ever seriously questioned the overall vote results.


Uh no. This election I had a president, two senators, a state senator, a state assembly, a county executive, city council, school board, prosecutor recall, and half a dozen ballot measures. It took four legal size paper surfaces.


Some of the regional elections in Germany have comically large ballots with dozens of options and a very complicated counting system (16 votes that can be split between individuals or party lists). The hand-counted results are generally available by the next morning. There is really no excuse for using electronic voting. In Germany it has been ruled unconstitutional since it cannot be checked by the voters.


Those could easily be prioritized. First count the federal elections, then the state elections, then the county elections. You get the presidential and congressional results within a day, the state election results within two-three days, and the more local ones within the week. Is anyone going to seriously complain that it took a week to find out who is on the school board?


Right, so there are more people to count the vote


There are a LOT of elections in the US. Where I live we have ~30 different things to vote on this election.

So the incentive to automate things are bigger here.


So does Denmark, why do you assume it's any different? Counting doesn't take that long when you split it across 10K voting districts, which is what the U.S. did for most of its existence. We want ACCURATE elections free from corruption and hacks. You can't undo a fucked up election.


I'm from Sweden where we only have 3 things to vote on (national, county, and city). I assumed Denmark was similar.


Europarlament too?


That's on a separate day.


Why should you compromise on security because you're impatient? Have the voter vote on paper; since it's only two candidates, this can be postcard-sized. Scan the postcards for the fast results, check and double check by hand (or visual if there's a picture taken by the scanner).


2 candidates for president, yes.

Plus US Senate, federal congressional district, state assembly, state Senate, 7 judges, and 6 paragraph-long ballot propositions.

Not only your postcard idea wouldn't work, manual counting 3 pages (!) of a giant ballot would get prone to errors and be expensive rather quickly.

I think the current electronic plus storing the paper ballot for future audit if needed offers the best of both worlds.


There were 22 different races to vote on in my ballot yesterday. Are you suggesting only hand count the presidential election then tally all the rest digitally?


This is so strange to me.. not complaining or criticising, just thanking you for the insight.

I would expect one ballot paper per vote (based on rare occasion of doing two at once) to ensure the count is simple and accurate.

They make the ballots different colours to ensure you put them in the correct boxes iirc


It wouldn't be a bad idea to break up federal, state and local elections into different ballots.


It isn't only two candidates. In my state we have 5 presidential candidates on the ballot along with 12 other local elections and ballot measures.


You can scan paper to make the count faster. The benefit of using paper is you can even use multiple scanners from different companies even.

Hand counts are actually not all that time-consuming for large groups. Voting districts are already broken down enough whete each polling station only has a few thousand ballots.


> The greater the delay, the more annoyed folks become.

Where's the problem with waiting? This is not some customer service to optimize for profit, there's no harm in waiting a bit.


You mean people that had to line up for hours can not wait a little longer for results?

Paper ballot have the advantage of being robust against e.g. power failures. They are also trivially to scale up - just need small secluded space for people to fill them and an additional pen - much shorter waiting lines. There is not BIOS, there is no software to be rolled out or computer to be procured, installed, secured and finally put in secure storage or securely disposed.


In my country we have paper ballots, but I have (quite seriously) never lined up for more than 20 minutes to vote!

Being a country with compulsory voting helps, because the system has to make it possible for everyone without a valid exceptional circumstance to be able to vote (would be unfair to be fined for not voting if you were still waiting in line to vote when the polls closed), and also they can quite accurately predict the kind of numbers they're going to get at the polling places.


People can want it fasted and people can become annoyed, but that's their choice. An election can be counted and verified only so quickly, it doesn't matter if people want it faster or not.


US election results take more time that every other paper ballot country so this is a lie


The US tends to combine rather than separate local, state, and federal elections, as well as not having a parliamentary system at either state or federal level (resulting in separate but often simultaneous legislative and executive elections, and in some states judicial as well), as well as having bicameralism at the federal level and most states (resulting in additional simultaneous legislative elections), as well as having initiative, recall, and/or referenda as significant functions in many states, as well as having non-unitary executives with multiple independently elected executive officers in many states as well as having many of those same state issues applying at the county and municipal levels as well (and, often, for overlapping additional special jurisdictions.)

As a result, there are a whole lot of separate elections conducted on the same ballot in the US, more than is typical elsewhere. This increases the tabulation load.


Colorado uses paper ballots. It's an all-mail voting state so every voter is mailed a paper ballot which is then dropped off or mailed back.


Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate.

There are currently many heads of household voting for their entire families, and even aside from mail-in ballots, there are people watching and photographing other family members voting within polling places, and uploading the photographs to social media with parental pride. In many places, this is not even criminal anymore.

Paper ballots, with voters having no method to prove who they voted for (no-receipt), in a private booth.


It's been the method of voting in Oregon for 25 years and Colorado for 10 years, when does the regret start? The current states that have all mail voting are also some of the least religious states in the country, you'd think the religious states would be pushing for it given the scenario you laid out. Colorado also had the second highest voter turn out nationwide in 2020 which supports the claim that all mail voting is good for increasing access to voting.


Of course mailing ballots increases turnout. That wasn’t the question. The question was how do we determine if the votes are fraudulent, for example someone filling out a ballot for their elderly parents against their will.


Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking. My signature has changed since I registered to vote here and I was notified in one election about it not matching and had to cure my ballot. If someone voted under my name, I would be notified of the processing of my ballot and could object to it. Ease of voting/security is still an important balance. I could easily create a 100% secure election and it would disenfranchise a lot of voters.


Signature matching is a notoriously weak verification, especially when the risk is within-family disenfranchisement. You almost certainly know your spouse's and parents' and children's signatures, you likely have signed in their name in various occasions before, so signing with their signature in a convincing enough way to fool a ballot counter who gets to spend probably ~10s at most on every mail-in ballot is extremely easy.

Not to mention, you can do the opposite: you can destroy your "wrong-minded" family member's ballots to prevent them from voting.


Destroying a ballot accomplishes nothing.

You can always still go vote in person at a polling center, even with all-mail voting they always keep a few open just in case someone loses or spoils their ballot.

They'll record the vote provisionally just to make sure you're not trying to vote twice, and once it's clear no mailed-in ballot arrived it gets counted.


I know my spouses signature and I definitely could not copy it for the life of me. I'm sure we could put it different safeguards and they would almost certainly disenfranchise orders of magnitude more legal votes than fraudulent ones given the scale on which we've proven voting fraud to happen.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...


> Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking.

Don't know about Colorado but many other states have been sending ballots to dead people as well as people who are not resident anymore. The potential for fraud is huge


The signature matching would be the first line of defense against that. They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is caught up front.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-gov...

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/colorado-noncitizens-deceas...


> They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration.

Is your claim that the social security administration sends a death notification to the deceased person's voter registrar?

https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/stateagreements.html


That is what is stated by the Secretary of State in the PBS link above.

“we get information when Coloradans pass away from two spots… the Department of Public Health and Environment and also the Social Security Administration.”


That kind of argument is open to criticism of survivorship bias.


Sure maybe and it still never seems to be proven on a substantial level. The Heritage foundation has an agenda to prove voter fraud and even going by thei number, it appears to be a 1 in every million vote level event. Far more legal votes are stopped by existing laws than illegal votes.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...


Oregon should never be the gold standard for how to do anything, ever. Can they even pump their own gas yet?



Before that changed I LOVED turning the attendants away as I grabbed my Diesel hose and started pumping. I loved telling them when they didn't know.


Ron Wyden seems cool.


This is addressed in serious voting systems.

In Sweden you can vote by mail, but it has to be done in a private booth on a post office. You have to show ID, of course.

That means everybody votes secretly, even when voting by mail.


Sweden doesn’t have the same racist history as the United States. In the US there’s a long history of making it very hard to get adequate photo ID or moving or closing polling locations in minority districts.


> Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don’t participate.

Firing people for not cooperating with something that is a crime under both federal and state law is a strategy that…doesn’t work very long for the criminals.

(Giving a large group of people who you don’t trust to vote your way that kind of criminal leverage over you in general is a pretty self-defeating strategy even without the intense incentives produced when you pile termination of employment on top of it.)

Also, near-universal mail-in voting isn’t some novel untested practice. Oregon has been doing it for more than two decades, Washington and Colorado for a decade, and even more states have adopted it between 2019 and 2022.


And what a diversity of election results those states have had since then!


Why would mail in voting create more diverse results? States that don’t mail ballots also haven’t had diverse results. These concepts are orthogonal. Mail in voting is intended to improve turnout, not diversify results.


You can vote by mail in all 50 states, and both red and swing states have no-excuse absentee. Your point doesn't stand up to the reality of these systems.


> [...] when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate.

That's a felony isn't it?


And tax fraud too?


> ... when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together ...

Are you able to cite any evidence for this sort of conspiracy, or is this mainly conjecture? My search came up short. While one can certainly imagine it taking place, particularly in smaller groups, I expect there are both federal and likely also state laws that would make such activities illegal. At the very least, it would seem hard to hide at scale.


That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that ends up in news. Are members of the congregation going to snitch on their "family"? If it happens it is something you would only know from experience.


Couldn't a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?

Is there any basis in reality for this?


> Couldn’t a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?

They could, though there are some problems with that:

(1) It is generally illegal to ask people to do that,

(2) Voters could “comply” with such a demand and simply mark a ballot the way the church wanted, take a picture, tell poll workers they had made an error marking their ballot and needed a replacement, have the ballot they photographed discarded, mark the replacement with their honest preferences, and cast that ballot.

Of course, (1) applies to the proposed scenario with mail-in ballots, and why large groups that aren’t already tightly-knit cults where they wouldn’t need to worry about defectors with secret ballots anyway would do it – it only takes on defector to get the whole group busted.


It's already illegal to do voter fraud!


I'm not sure how the laws are in all states, but where I am it's illegal to use a camera or cell phone within 100 feet of a voting booth so if you tried to take a picture of your ballot, you'd likely get asked to put the camera away by a poll worker. This was done with the specific intent of protecting the privacy of people's votes.


And now the abuser can just say "show me a picture of your ballot" since we all take our phones into the booth. And the abuser might stand in line and watch to see if you get a second ballot. And you could quickly use photo editing software to fake it, but the abuser might run analysis...

Where is the line of accepted risk?


Photos of ballots are a criminal offence in the UK, which obviously is imperfect in an abusive relationship, but does help set a general norm that the vote is secret.


Abusive relationships are typically criminal in of themselves so not sure laws will help here.


[flagged]


Because places of worship in Christianity are usually called churches and Christianity is the most common religion in the United States.

So if I was going to pick a single word used to represent places of worship when describing such in the United States, “churches” would be a good choice.


[flagged]


That seems like a pretty uncharitable interpretation. Based on the entirety of the comment that doesn’t seem to be the intent.


[flagged]


>If it's no big deal, just post the same comment with the word mosque or synagogue.

Why only "mosque or synagogue"? Are you singling out Abrahamic religions? What about shrines and temples? Words have meanings. If it's no big deal, just post the same comment with the word "places of worship" to be inclusive. :^)


I mentioned temples above. Feel free to choose any alternative you'd prefer. :^)


I agree. All those Kamala ads about wives in the polling place defying their misogynistic husbands miss the fact that those controlling husbands would demand that their wives receive mail-in ballots, and then use intimidation and pressure to ensure the vote.

The fact that this is rarely discussed probably means that it rarely actually happens. Political beliefs between husbands and wives are usually quite correlated, I'd imagine.

The issue of maliciously voting for you elderly grandparent may happen, but is probably very very rare.


It's nice to hear how effective that ad was at getting under people's skin.


Strongly disagree. As would any voter who had their vote suppressed in Florida in 2000 due to confusing analog voting machines, dangling chads, or “partially” filled bubbles.


It does not make sense to paint paper ballots as something that is inherently better.. Paper ballots have many potential vector attacks many of which are stupidly easy or even unintentional (e.g. hanging chads)


Hanging chads, which are anyway still a problem introduced by machine-counting, not hand counting, are much less problematic than hacking a voting machine. There is no tie between your vote choice and the probability of a hanging chad, so this doesn't bias the election against any particular candidate. A hacked voting machine does have intentional bias.


Hanging chads were caused by a dumb idea to make ballots automatically countable. The solution is to make ballots easier to hand-count, by having separate ballot papers for each position (or at least the most important ones) and counting them by hand.


Computer security (computer system quality in general) can't really be turned into a metric, which means it can't be understood by bureaucracies, which means it can't be valued and upheld by large public or private organizations, which means it's in shambles everywhere that well-intentioned engineers aren't upholding it out of their own personal (usually unrewarded) integrity

Tale as old as time


true as it can be


The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc.

The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.


Just use paper, and count by hand on the day.

You need to present an election system that will convince Joe Q. Public, who is almost certainly not as tech-literate as this forum, is probably not even white-collar or university educated, and likely also suspicious of globalisation. "Tamper-proof Indian system-on-a-chip" does not have that property. Otherwise you get increasingly unhinged arguments over the election results until something breaks.


A high speed electronic ballot reader with a mechanical counter display. So you can stand there and watch it count. Then run it through a duplicate machine. It should say the same thing.

Appropriately documenting these occurrences should not be hard. Appropriately archiving them would be moderately difficult but would serve as the evidence of the final tally. The final tally of all precincts could then be calculated by any number of independent organizations.

There can't be any hard to understand computer voodoo, deleteable audit logs, or single vendor reporting the final tally. No one should trust that anyways.


Unfortunately, hand-counting causes more errors than electronic counting, except in very small communities.

Ref.: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hand...


It's not so much about errors tbh - paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed. The fear is that voting machines are insecure, its input or results tampered with, and then you can't do a recount. Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.


> Unless they generate a paper receipt as well that the voter has to confirm before the vote is counted.

Indeed! I've volunteered at polling places where this is done.

I think one reason polling places have gravitated towards the "use paper ballots for everything, which are then scanned" option is because you're likely going to have something like that anyway, for mail-in ballots. It does bring problems, but you still have the paper to fall back to.


The machine prints a paper record at the same time. Couldn't they just read off the paper record as easily as recounting paper ballots?


The voter-verified paper record for use in audit (including recount) purposes has been a federal law requirement in effect since January 1, 2006, for voting machines (adopted under the Help America Vote Act of 2002.)


> paper votes can be re-counted as often as needed

That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago.

In principle I don't really disagree, but just saying the problems run rather deeper than just hand-counting vs. electronic voting. The one time a recount actually would have been useful it was stopped for highly legalistic reasons that are hard to explain to a normal person. Not only that, it's highly likely – perhaps even probable – that Gore won Florida, although we'll never know for sure.

I see no reason it would play out any different today. We all saw what happened during the last election.

Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted. Given the very small margins in some states, even a very small error rate (malicious or otherwise) can really matter. Perhaps this is paranoid, but I fully expect Trumpdroids to try to cheat. Any idiot can cheat a handcount "by accident" (prove it otherwise), but actually tampering with voting machines is operationally much more complex, and not something any ol' yahoo can easily pull off (need not just technical knowledge, but also physical access).

tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.


> That's not exactly what happened in Florida 24 years ago.

Which is one of the reasons why the Help America Vote Act[0] was passed two years later.

> The one time a recount actually would have been useful…

I understand things are stressful, but please avoid resorting to hyperbole. There are other times in American history when a recount has changed the result. For example, see the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election[2].

> Not only that, with the full-on cult of Trump and the perceived victimhood of his supporters, I'm not really sure to what degree hand counts can always be trusted.

> tl;dr: it's all pretty fucked no matter what.

Be an observer.

Seriously: Be an observer. For example, Orange County (California) has their public notice[2] inviting "the public" (that's you!) to observe election operations. Tomorrow, assuming you're in a place that allows early voting, go to a polling place or vote center (or whatever they're called there) and observe. On (and after) Election Day, go to your county's registrar of voters (or whatever they are called where you are) and observe the tally. Learn how to call out when something is wrong, and learn how to "observe the observers" to call out if they say something is wrong (assuming you think their call is BS.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act

[1]: https://ocvote.gov/sites/default/files/elections/gen2024/Pub...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...


Ironically in the US the current nonsense about election fraud might push electronic ballots further. If you're going to cry wolf over paper ballots then you might as well do whatever you want, literally nothing will ever satisfy them. There's no sense even trying to appease.


"nonsense about election fraud"... the very real election fraud happening all over the place, just as it did last election (in which the legal truths are just being made public)?


Look, I don't know who you are or what has led you to this position, but it's worth I think giving an appeal a chance. You are being tricked and manipulated for someone else's political gain. I know it sucks to hear and every human's response to shut down the thoughts, because admitting to yourself that you've been had is an uncomfortable thought. But I'm asking you to at least entertain the possibility.

We talk a lot on HN about people's beliefs being a reflection of the systems they're placed under— you show me the incentives I'll show you the outcome— and the incentives are clear as day. Democratic voters have two nice properties that are being exploited, Democrats are generally concentrated in major metro areas, and Democrats vote early and by mail. Being concentrated makes those counties easy targets for lawsuits hoping to tie up the process with vague nothingness and rule-lawyering to try and turn away voters. Attacking mail in voting very cleanly affects almost entirely Democrats. And pre-undermining the election results act as a hedge to explain away a loss. Because this is a must-win election for Trump's GOP, two losses in a two risks pushing the "MAGA" faction of the party into irrelevancy.

And so that's what you see, it's a narrative that has been pushed hard designed specifically to carry out the exploit. It's genuinely clever and once it reaches critical mass the people who are tricked into actually believing it outnumber the original concern-trolls so it's naturally self-perpetuating.

So look, I have no expectation that you'll change your stance, I just hope at least that if you really bought into it that going forward you'll at least do it on purpose and be in on the game.


I think random, serialized paper ballots are the way to go. When the polls close you know the serial numbers of every vote cast, so no new serial numbers should be added to that unless a very good reason. Keep them or destroy them afterwards is another issue, but it's a step in the right direction.

I have some distrust in the American voting system, first with the computerized systems, but also that federal elections are run at the state level. With so many states and jurisdictions, I can't help but feel that fraud is happening. If the federal elections process was truly federalized, and funded if it is not already, managed and controlled by the federal government, then I think there could be greater control and security.


https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/08/vg-2024-how-your-vote-gets-co...

Colorado ballot envelopes already have a bar code - essentially your "serial number".

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because everyone who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know anything about how elections work.


Virtually all the election deniers live in a sphere of unreality where they only listen to what their politicians/keepers tell them, they don't care about reality.


> who thinks there's widespread election fraud seems to not know anything about how elections work.

Does your knowledge imply the system is perfect? Is there more than one type of voter fraud? Do we mean just one or two particular federal elections or all elections at every level? What about internal party elections, have those all been extremely fair and above board lately?

There's obvious advantages to perpetrating this class of fraud. Historically we know this fraud has interfered in all types of elections at all levels. Why would this not continue to be a target?

I mean, even in your link, Step 1 includes mailing ballots in. Even recently we've seen the simple flaws in this insecure mechanism. How could you have such a level of confidence in this system? The fact the smart and well meaning people do is all the more reason to engage this subject more rigorously.

Perhaps a more generous interpretation to people making these claims is to understand that we are still not doing a good enough job at making our elections secure, easy, free and fair. For Hacker News this should easily be understood to be a technical challenge and one that the USA has yet again completely failed to succeed at.


It's not a technical challenge, it's a sociological one. No amount of technical security features or published explanations will convince a group of people who have already decided they are being screwed by "the system".

I do agree that America is failing this test.


Oh hey looks like I found one of the ballots sent to everyone in the state and filled it out and sent it back in.

It's literally that easy in Colorado.


No it's not. Your signature would have to match the one on file.

Further, if the person the ballot rightfully belonged to actually wants to vote, they'll either request a new one or vote in person - either one of which would invalidate the earlier mailed ballot.


It’s not that easy and knowledge of how it works is one search away. Here’s a source that explains the process: https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/colorado-elections-ballot-cou...


What do you do when duplicate serial numbers start showing up? I'm assuming you won't know who was issued which serial number, and if it's truly randomized you wouldn't even know where they were sent.


Then you have clear proof of election fraud and the FBI, NSA, etc can get to work. Invalidate the election results and do a new one.


> Invalidate the election results and do a new one.

The chaos that would ensue from this is staggering.


Much better to just deny it till after the new government is in, then make a nothing-burger out of all the news that is reported "afterwards"? Meanwhile, 50% of your country is disenfranchised for X-years because it was "less chaos" to just accept the vote and move on.


How would they "get to work"?

And your proposed resolution means someone could DoS an election by copying their ballot and submitting it.


'Just do a new election' is not a valid fallback.


Not valid why? Lack of political will, or logistically unfeasible?


For one duplicate?


Go be a poll worker in your local election. See if you change your mind.


The last thing we need is to Federalize voting. Our system is robust BECAUSE it is local. The last thing I'd want is a Federal system under a President's influence.


Can you think of a reason why the people who wrote the rules we have now would want to avoid putting federal elected officials in charge or running federal elections?


When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did have wheels though).

Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a privacy curtain behind you. Then you would have to manually turn an individual mechanical switch for each choice. When finished voting, you would throw the big mechanical lever back to the original position. Moving the lever back would cause all of your votes to be counted, reset all voting switches, and open the privacy curtains. There were mechanical counters for all possible voting options. Then, when the polls closed the votes would be read off the counters (and presumably verified by multiple individuals) and then reported to the whoever they reported the results to.

This was before the internet, but the same machines could (and should) be used in the internet age. There's nothing to hack into electronically as the voting machines contain no electronics (at least for communications, for sure).

The only big downside is that the machines have to be stored somewhere and they take up a sizable space. Also, they incur expenses to be moved from storage to polling places (and back).

Someone will bring up voters with disabilities, but there were voters with disabilities back then too. I'm sure there was a protocol for accommodating voter disabilities.

All in all, I think it's a sensible and pragmatic solution to thwart hacking and hopefully garner more confidence in voting integrity.


Mechanical punch-card voting machines fell out of use after the 2000 election showed that they're more error-prone than either electronic voting machines or paper ballots.


Curious to know more. Is there a good source of information on the security of the hardware and software used for elections India.

As an Indian citizen I see the casual lack of security mindset in large swathe of things implemented by both public and private actors. Many things get better only though iterative failures and corresponding reactive fixes.

What type of failures and improvements have happened here, or instances of demonstrated hardness against those with motivation and access to machinery.


Electronic Voting Machine/Elections in India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHJZrXrnyQ

The Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) do simple counting of key presses and keep tally of the totals.

The machines are not reprogrammable, run on alkaline batteries and have no WiFi/Bluetooth, USB or ethernet.


IIRC it uses tamper evident hardware.

There was an interview with one of the Profs who designed the EVMs here.


Regarding Indian voting machines, there is also randomization involved at various levels during distribution making it difficult to game the system but still I always wonder if there is any way to hack the system. I hope people in charge have a process to continuously evaluate the security procedures and improve it.


I never understood the desire to have any kind of machine at all. Paper ballots are a perfectly efficient and scalable system used for many large elections. Even if complicated machines are theoretically safe against malfeasance, keeping it simple increases public confidence.


Scalable? Not for same-day. I'd be fine waiting a few days if needed, though. Heck, early voting means I wait for weeks now.

Ranked choice voting is essentially doing multiple elections at a time, having to recount portions of votes every time a candidate drops out. That's a lot easier with computers.

I think the totals from every precinct could be made public in a way that they are verifiable from a central database, where the numbers add up to the total for the state and eventually federal count.

This is probably already happening, but people don't seem to think so.


The UK manages to produce results within a few hours and all ballots, at least for general elections, are hand counted.

I agree that for voting systems other than FPTP it is more work and may take longer - but it’s not an intractable problem.


Same-day? It is not a problem at all. For example Finland calculates enough paper ballots in hours to give a definitive result, I am sure there are other countries that manage it as well. Your imagination is stuck in the world of voting practices of your side of the pond.


In the case of India, keep in mind that the country still has a significant illiteracy rate (about 20% as of 2018) and plenty of people who have literally never used a paper form in their lives. One of the key design goals of the machines is to try and reduce the education needed as much as possible while still keeping things more private and efficient than voice votes.


I should say, the speed of tabulation. An American election can include ballot lines for president, senator, member of congress, state senator, three state representatives, a county councilmember or two, a member of the board of education etc.


If the speed of tabulation is the main reason then why are results no longer known by election night? They're saying it might be days again. When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)


>When we had paper ballots, we knew that night. (For America)

You forgot about 2000. Also, the main reason for the delays are mail-in ballots, which could be delayed for days/weeks, depending on how lenient the deadlines are.


2000 was punch cards and it came down to a razor thin 500 votes in a single swing state.

By law the mail-in ballots have to be in by election day.


More bits of paper. The ballot papers around here are bloated oversize monstrosities (picture A3 sized) due to the number of parties and candidates but you get a separate one for each election. Unfortunately not every area is paper only.


Here we don't even put names on the ballot, instead there is number assigned for each, this scales up to hundreds of candidates. This does prevent write ins, but I see no reason why you could not have own ballot for each purpose and then say colour code them and append letter or two in front of each candidate for each election.


I don't see how the median voter can be confident in making no mistakes. Not even programmers are willing to write out a list of opcodes anymore.


Scale is a bit of an issue.

We need results in as short a time as possible, ws have about 100 crore registered voters, of whom about 70% on average vote, meaning that the ECI must process 70 Crore votes, in under 10 hours.

Making that happen in a free and fair way is a logistical challenge, one that we undertake every 5 years.

One more large advantage of EVMs is making booth capture very expensive (because EVMs have a inbuilt rate limit, but a ballot box does not).

At any rate, with VVPAT being there, it adds another layer of security.


For everyone wondering: 100 crore is 1 billion, 70 crore is 700 million.

Why do you need the result in under 10 hours?


Tell me you're under 24 years old without telling me you're under 24 years old.

The US 2000 election was a fiasco of the failures of paper ballots. Officials spent weeks scrutinizing ballots and to this day nobody thinks they got it correct to within the margin of error.

That's when electronic machines came in. They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.


That was punch-card ballots, which are also crap. Most of Europe uses a piece of paper you mark with an 'X' in pen or pencil.


Those were punch card ballots and trying to determine if indented or “hanging chads” were votes or not


> They are not necessarily better, but nobody who lived through that nightmare thinks fondly of the clarity of paper ballots.

I lived through that, it wasn't that big a deal, and I still think fondly of the clarity of paper ballots. No system is perfect, but paper ballots work and work well.


> The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.

The US election system is very distributed and fragmented - there is virtually no standardization.

Even in the tightest margins for something like President you'd need to have seriously good data to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.


> to figure out which random municipality voting system(s) you'd need to target to actually affect the outcome.

As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals, if you can interfere with just tallying during or after the fact, and you can get the information on other precincts before any other outlets, you could easily take advantage of this.

It's essentially the Superman II version of interfering with an election. Just put your thumb on the scale a little bit everywhere on late precincts all at once.

The fact that so many states let a simple majority of their state take _all_ electors actually makes this possible. If more states removed the Unit Rule and went like Nebraska and Maine this would be far less effective.


> As you said, no standardization, which means all precincts reports on wildly different time intervals

There is standardization within all precincts of a county. And from my past experience as a poll worker, I can tell you why precinct reporting times can vary wildly within a county.

(Note things I say here are specific to the county where I worked.)

Anyone in line to vote by 8PM is allowed to vote. We (the other poll workers and I) could not start closing the polls until every voter had voted. If the local community did not trust vote-by-mail, then that polling place will likely see delays in closing due to lines.

One polling place often covered multiple precincts, so you'll see multiple precincts delayed simultaneously.

After that, boxes go from one queue to another, with multiple queues consolidating into one or two. So, a one-minute delay in dropping off your box to a collection point, may mean a two-hour delay in that box being processed.

> if you can interfere with just tallying

First off, that would require a remarkable amount of fraud. Second, that's why there are observers. It doesn't matter if it's 2AM on the Wednesday after election day: If tabulating is happening, you are allowed to observe.


Ironically America's fragmentary and incoherent electoral system makes it extremely hard to steal an election there.


The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. You think it would be unfeasible to flip 500 votes in a critical swing state with such a system?


The question is how to know which county you need to do that in. The more you try, the greater the odds of being caught but with margins that small you’d need to attempt multiple states and predict rather accurately how many votes you need to win but not to attract too much scrutiny.


Moreover the problem there isn't the distributed/local control of voting, but the College.


You say "fragmentary and incoherent", I say "decentralized".


Decentralised could be each counter putting 5000 or so ballots into piles with people wandering around witnessing for various parties all working a rigid process accross the nation. Each count publically announced in the room before witnesses.

Totally standardised, coordinated, and decentralised. But fragmented (structuraly) or incoherent.

But agree would be a million times worse with a single electronic system


Wouldn't you only need to target a handful of battleground districts/states? No point in trying to turn Vermont red or Wyoming blue.


Is this type of system not vulnerable to a supply chain attack?


It's a matter of when, if, and, if we will ever know


Are paper ballots and hand counting such a big problem? To me there is something special with the pageantry and ceremony of physically going to a central location to vote, filling out a ballot, physically placing it in a collection box, and then having another human count it. All that pageantry trumps whatever efficiency you get from automating this process with computers, and mobile phones and databases and internets.


They don't create billions of dollars for election machine makers.


There are two other nascent problems in Colorado this year:

Ballots printed by Fort Orange Press are failing through the scan reader. This is annoying, and small counties appear not to have rehearsed the combinations of paper and scanner. There will be a lot of hand counting, which requires party-appointed poll workers.

A notable but insignificant number of ballots in Mesa county failed to authenticate signatures and when contacted, those voters said hadn’t voted yet. Once the signature matches, the ballot becomes part of a large box, indistinguishably. This describes something like 3 ballots.


In case anyone is wondering what the worst case scenario is here’s an overview of how voting works in Colorado:

https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/colorado-elections-ballot-cou...

Importantly there’s always an audit in which auditors verify random samplings of ballots. This audit process is overseen by judges from the Republican and Democrat parties.

So even if all the voting software was compromised the audit would still catch any manipulation in the vote entry.


The whole voting process is fundamentally broken in this country. One side argues we need to fix this and is told it’s fine. I then see articles like this and can’t help but reaffirm they’re right.


Confirmation bias in action: accepting as true information that confirms your preexisting beliefs while ignoring information that contradicts them.

E.g. this article has information in it that refutes the idea that the voting process in CO is fundamentally broken; it describes aspects of their security-in-depth which show how a single vulnerability doesn’t lead to compromised election results. (Not to mention the auditing process which would also have to be fully compromised for the results of even fully hacked voting machines to be accepted.)



Interestingly, a website set up to document voter fraud by Mike 'My Pillow' Lindell has collected hundreds of election law violations, many in Colorado. For some reason they are all dated for the future though. Might be a warning signal about not populating your database where the public can watch you doing it.

https://archive.ph/smlSQ (capture of https://electionnexus.com from earlier today)


Same guy has been running a $14.88 promotion for a month (14/88 is a recognised US far-right symbol: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488)


Do you also believe Walmart is marketing chocolate cookies to hate groups or is the price an unfortunate coincidence when they do it?

https://www.walmart.com/ip/President-s-Choice-The-Decadent-C...


How many products does Walmart sell, though? I don't think they advertise on 'right side broadcast network', which also inexplicably advertises 'Trump combat knives' during his rallies.


You can't accuse something of being a dog whistle only when Person A says it, but not Person B. It either is or isn't. To do otherwise would be applying a double standard.


Well, I'm not the person who posted about it in the first place, but on their behalf I disagree. There's a rather obvious difference between between a retailer who sells many thousands of products (where pricing decisions are made across broad categories and likely automated) and one that just markets a single product.

I don't think Lindell is a nazi, but I also don't feel sorry for him for having to fend off such accusations, since he is an enthusiastic trafficker in conspiracy theories in his own right. He could make the non-troversy go away any time by changing the price to some similar number, but probably sees it as free advertising.


I feel like you're missing their point. The person you're replying to made a convincing argument that differentiates Person A and Person B by considering the fraction of products sold and how that affects the probability of the null hypothesis (using that price by chance). That's not a double standard.


Appears as $14.83 to me...


The ADL is a joke of an organization. Professional bullies.


He’s also selling pillow cases for $24.98. Which secret hate symbol is that one?


This is just a Q-anon level conspiracy theory.

The ADL has a database full of “hate symbols” that nobody uses or some random person on the internet used one time. It’s a joke and the ADL uses it to bully other groups and people into silence.


Is the site satire? There's basically no information of each "incident" aside from the state and a bunch of hashtags.


No it's his real site afaik. I'm guessing they put in some fake data for testing purposes but are not very competent. I'd hate to think that they were just making shit up.


Then you don't know anything about the election denier and liar that is Mike.


I don't know why this is down voted. The dude has 0 credibility and is for sure making things up.


Because a decent chunk of America is in a performative cult.


It seems more likely that this is just test data, based on the time being the exact same for all of the datapoints and there being a currently null column for “post url”, suggesting that these will all be sourced to a social media post which at least significantly increases the complexity of faking it, especially when there are bound to be plenty of posts claiming incidents.


That would support Colorado having a robust system then and we shouldn't be concerned just like the SoS says. If their system was bad, they wouldn't be catching the voter fraud.


The article isn't clear whether they self reported or were made aware. The affidavit mentioned someone reported they had accessed the passwords multiple times before it was taken down. Seems to me someone reported it to the GOP.


That’s quite weird. Specifically to the BIOS password story, nearly every county has a dusty ol computer on that list. These appear to be backup systems revived on-demand.


More likely something like hand-rolling timezone conversion code.


I think the timestamp column is straight up broken. I checked the first and last few pages and they all have the same timestamp.


No, it's weirder than that. All the samples I pulled up had the same date and time without showing any time zone information: 2024-11-03 01:43:25


    "In addition to the Department of State Employees and in coordination with county clerks, these employees will only enter badged areas in pairs to update the passwords for election equipment in counties and will be directly observed by local elections officials from the county clerk's office.
This is a bit weird. Someone having a perfectly legitimate excuse to fiddle with voting machines, urgently, two days before elections.


As Jeff Bezos said a few days ago: "Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first."

This is not an election where we can afford doubt.


Bezos? What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say about elections and why would anyone listen? He has a newspaper to speak for him, why is he saying this stuff under his own name?

Edit: i was out of the loop but apparently bezos decided to throw his chips out the window for little benefit to himself (or anyone). Just goes to show the wealthy are just as capable of being morons as the rest of us


There's a corollary to the fallacy of appeal to authority, which is that it's also a fallacy of rejecting an idea outright on the grounds it doesn't come from an authority. It's an insightful observation whether or not you like Bezos.


I don't really have an opinion about the man outside of "growing a business", but how on earth does this benefit him? I don't know where on earth you got "authority" from as i didn't invoke this concept at all.


> What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say about elections and why would anyone listen?


I can't see what you're referring to. Maybe you can show me.


I don’t know why this is so hard in America.

All other developed countries make this work, what are Americans lacking?

The system is just: - Keep a list of citizens allowed to vote

- Print paper ballots with the names of the candidates

- ask for a proper ID with photograph

- collect the votes

- count them by hand with the oversee of representatives of the candidates

That’s it, that’s all there’s to it and we count 99% of the votes in less than 6h.


Other posters have mentioned that there's historically been a lot of voter suppression in the US, which has led to a lot of people being against anything that would make voting harder ("ask for a proper ID with photograph").

However there is another more cynical thing going on, which is that in recent times the pro-voting-rights Democratic party has also benefited electorally from the increased turnout resulting from looser voting rules. This has made any changes to voter ID laws impossible to pass federally (where they are currently set).

This situation is changing now though because polling and the last election suggest that increased turnout currently benefits Republicans. Many commentators believe that within a year the Democratic party will actually be agnostic on voting ID laws, and already in this election you can see that "getting out the vote" is not much of a Democratic talking point.


Because the races are close and both candidates have access to the same technology, which also drives them closer, they attack the process.

It can be difficult to get on the list of eligible voters; different places count different things as a proper ID. If you are poor or marginalized in other ways, getting a proper ID can be a challenge. The US has a long history of trying to prevent substantial populations from voting; it’s even designed into the Constitution.

Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that votes in Pennsylvania that don’t have the date written on them (properly) but were mailed in don’t have to be counted. That has nothing to do with the intent of the voter, but political factions think it affects their chances one way or the other. In some states, you can’t give water to people while they wait in line to vote.


You're leaving out that a good portion of developed countries also offer some form of voting by mail. Some US states have rules in place that dictate any mail-in ballots can only be counted starting on election day - since they take more time to process (for verification etc.), this creates large delays in individual states.

Also the photo ID part is different in the US, since there's no uniform governmental ID that every citizen is expected to have. Minorities are less likely to have such ID compared to non-minorities, and (since minorities are disproportionately more likely to be poor) on average face larger issues acquiring such ID.


Vote by mail is completely negligible in countries where the described process works fine.


As an example, in the 2021 election in Germany 47.3% of votes were cast by mail: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/01/PE22_036_14.html

Are you trying to say that the process doesn't work fine in Germany?


I’m arguing it’s not a factor. In Portugal vote by mail is negligible and we get the results late the same night.


I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say. Obviously processing mail-in ballots won't take long if there aren't many. But as I've shown, countries with uncontested elections have many people voting by mail, so unless you're contesting the German elections this by itself isn't suspicious. And since states have rules about when counting is allowed to start, it's also obvious that counting them will finish later.

So what is your point?


My point is that other developed countries are perfectly able to have a transparent electoral process and present the results in very little time, even doing everything by paper voting.

Arguments that you need voting machines, or extensive mail voting, or pre voting, or not check a valid photo ID to be able to carry out the process in due time, are completely against what the reality shows in all other developed countries.


And yet other developed countries are perfectly able to have a transparent electoral process and present the results in very little time, even doing both paper voting and mail-in voting. Why deprive your citizens of mail-in voting when it's not necessary for safe elections? If you remove the laws that make mail-in voting take longer to count, it will not take as long to count.

Additionally, you seem to be willfully ignoring the differences regarding photo ID between the US and most other developed countries. Why?


Ah yes, the old rest of the world reduced to a single system.

> - ask for a proper ID with photograph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws


Is voting fraud at stake here or leak info over who voted? Is it possible to infer who voted what from the leak?


No, because of the way CO runs elections. But it is possible to gin up fraud claims and then resort to violence if the candidate who did this before loses again.


That just seems so unlikely. What sort of out-of-touch ego monster, bigger than Jesus, flaming asshole would do this?


If you broaden fraud to include interference, suppression, etc yes absolutely


Hey everyone, let's use handy computers that can count and do math quicker than any human on the planet. They'll just need days to count them all and if they flip someone's vote, oh well "we can't fix that".


I hate the narratives around voting security in the US. One side says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud, most secure election in history, etc etc. The other side claims that the election was completely stolen from them by voting machines.

Neither of these claims is right. Personally, I doubt the election was stolen. I know of a handful of cases of voter fraud both anecdotally ("My mom [in a retirement home] told me to vote for McCain, but I know she really wanted to vote for Obama, so that's what I put.") and numerically[1].

I would not be surprised if one or two of the very razor thin House district elections in 2020 experienced enough fraud to flip the decision. This doesn't mean that I believe all of the Dominion voting system hack nonsense or anything like that. I just think only a Sith deals in absolutes.

1: https://apnews.com/article/ohio-voters-citizenship-referrals...


> One side says that it is totally secure, basically 0 fraud, most secure election in history

Additionally, the sides have completely flipped. Utterly bizarre.


Before 2020 the only allegations of significant fraud or other shenanigans I remember were immediately after elections and were dropped shortly afterwards when no evidence could be found for them.

Note that the Bush/Gore election issues were not allegations of fraud or any intentional shenanigans. The issue there was a badly designed ballots and/or badly designed voting machines that let to a large number of spoiled ballots due to people voting for more than one candidate or not marking any candidate, and in one major county led many voters to mark a candidate other than the one they intended to mark.

All the controversy there after the election was how to resolve those problems. Some, like the infamous "hanging chads" could in some cases be resolved by hand examination of the ballot, but there would often be some ambiguity so that would not be without controversy.

Others, like the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County did not lead to any physical problem with the ballot but the design of the ballot led many voters to vote for a candidate other than the one they intended to vote for. That was a completely novel failure mode and the system had no procedure for dealing with it.


What I meant was, the security of electronic voting machines in general.

Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking.

We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion."

Whether or not an election has actually ever been hacked at the voting machine level is a separate conversation.


Hasn't every other type of computing system been hacked? These systems are so insecure they're leaking passwords on the internet and smart people somehow still believe they've never been tampered with. Trillions of dollars on the line and ability to shape policy for the most powerful economy and military on planet earth but for sure, there's never been any hacks even though we're openly leaking passwords and social security numbers on the internet.


The Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, adding important mandates such as a hand-recountable paper trail for every electronic voting machine. Concerns predating that mandate were a very different beast than the unfounded claims one party is making now.


> Prior to Trump, it was afaict an accepted fact among software people that closed source electronic voting machines were sitting ducks ripe for hacking. We went from "don't trust Diebold" to "how dare you question Dominion."

We didn’t, you’re just grossly over-simplifying a couple decades of history. In the 2000s, there were some very bad electronic voting systems which did not maintain paper records or printed receipts which which were never validated. That lead to tons of criticism – and better designs.

In 2020, nobody said “how dare you question Dominion” because the whole point was that we _don’t_ trust Dominion and use systems which are designed to be verifiable and the results had been independently checked multiple times.


Good thing we fixed the hanging chad issue.

Did Republicans anywhere try to "secure elections" in a way that didn't involve curtailing voting rights? Improving voting machines, systems, counting, etc. in a way that partisan leadership couldn't mess with?

Georgia, I predict, will be a shitshow this year.


I live in one of if not the most critical county in the entire country this election.

It's going to be insane here.

This week alone we've had Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Tim Walz stumping here.

https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election...


I’m in the opposite scenario - my vote will not matter since my county/state is not close to 50/50.

It’s a laughably depressing system. I think (without any supporting evidence) the national election system was designed to fit to the standards of transportation and communication 200+ years ago. It was actually feasible to vote per state then send one dude on horseback to DC to cast the vote for the whole state. That’s an OK system for the time.

But the fact that each state is given an approximate weight for its vote (electoral college system), is evidence to how we are trying get to something that looks like a nationally counted winner take all election. We’re just doing it terribly.

If we fixed these issues then election campaigns couldn’t just focus on swing states and ignore everyone else. The game theory would then shift to just needing to convince a majority of all voters to vote for you.


Should there be no balance between state size? California always determining the president and ensuring Montana and Rhode Island are never campaigned in?


I am not convinced states should be the decider of president, rather than the people.

Besides, in your example, neither of those states matter anyway. Why should Pennsylvania be so important, merely because the electorate seems evenly split between the two major parties?


Not bizarre at all. It's BS, but it's not bizarre.

Politics has become trench warfare. Everything is a battle to the death to keep the other side from gaining an inch anywhere. And, as is often the case in warfare, truth is a casualty. Both sides will say absolutely anything to keep anyone from thinking that the other side has a valid point.

It's advertising, but without any truth-in-advertising laws. Or, if you prefer, it's propaganda. Any relationship to the truth is purely accidental.


The true casualty is America’s credibility abroad. In pretty much every capital, embassy, boardroom, etc… it noticeably declines year on year.

Even the Brits don’t take anything at face value anymore.


Our credibility has been suddenly made synonymous with how willing we are to go to war on behalf of other countries . We are not

But I think any attack on an American force will get you a quick lesson on our credibility, which, as an American, is all I really care about.

Similarly economically, good luck not participating in the American markets.


I really don’t want to burst your bubble… but do you not realize this is seen as a joke abroad?

e.g. In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year.

They treat even a random third secretary for some party committee 100km from Hanoi much much better than the 90th percentile upper middle class American household in the Bay Area…

Edit: And I’m not even going to talk about Eastern Europe or the Middle East, it’s really too harsh to put into writing.


Hanoi? Are you refering to pulling out of Vietnam made the US seem like a joke? Or that the locals are wrong to celebrate that?


What exactly are you confused about? It seems pretty clearly spelled out.


It just seemed so absurd wanting American diplomats to be salty about the Vietnam War.

Like, the Vietnam War. I don't even know where to begin.


Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me?

Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi?

It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.


> In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year.

I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats.

This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty concerning the Vietnam War, to not lose face or something.


I am not an American diplomat…???


You said something that he found unclear (so did I). He asked for clarification. You refused to give it. And now you mock his reading comprehension? Since at least two of us couldn't be sure what you meant, maybe you should work on writing less cryptically.

Also, site guidelines call for charitable interpretation. When someone asks you to clarify, assume they need it clarified.


Why do you believe your opinion on this or that is more relevant than other passing readers? Is there some novel argument your preparing?

Since the comment in question doesn’t have a negative score currently and some time has elapsed, passing readers combined have already decided in a more credible way than a single individual can.


I'm confused. You're upset that America has made peace with Vietnam and treats its diplomats to courtesy state dinners and such? Who cares?

The Cold War ended almost 30 years ago. I don't live in the past. I look forward to a glorious future, where we can even work with dirty commies. If the people of Vietnam don't like their government, they should feel free to overthrow it.


I’m not upset? It’s a factual example, that’s what ‘e.g.’ means…

It’s not some fanfiction story I made up while reading a novel…


I don't care if America wines and dines commie Vietnamese.


Okay…?


This is the kind of boring "both side-ism" that I just don't understand. I have no great love of either party, but one side is openly speculating about all sorts of things that cannot be described as anything other than outright authoritarian, and the other party ... is not. And no, some disagreements on free speech or the 2nd amendment or whatnot is not even close. And no, "oh, he's not really serious about it" doesn't fly either.

And with one party transformed in the Monster Raving Loony Party, the other one can't do anything else but push its own agenda through when it can, so compromise becomes rarer and rarer. And it's not just Trump – remember the madness and obstructionism of the Obama years?

And yes, there have been times the Democratic party could have done better. No doubt. But it's absolutely not a "both sides" issue.


The issue in question was truth, not authoritarianism. Specifically, the issue was truth about election security. The point was that both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose, and "most secure election in history" when they win.

More generally: In the current election, Harris isn't the firehose of lies that Trump is. She isn't a shining beacon of truth, either.


"Most secure election in history" was a superlative I'm not happy with either, no. But the core of it is correct: there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud.

The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.

Equating these two is just bizarre. "Murder, arson, and jaywalking". Or something like that.

And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.


> there is no evidence of wide-spread fraud.

Agreed. There were 60+ court cases, but not evidence of fraud.

> The core of the other side is outright lies and fraud, rooted in nothing more than one person's narcissism.

Also agreed.

> Equating these two is just bizarre.

I wasn't.

> And "both sides will, and have, claim election fraud when they lose" is just not true. There have been a few disagreements over the decades of course, some more reasonable than others, but nothing like 2016 has happened in recent history, from either party.

I presume you mean 2020, not 2016. Yes, nothing like that has happened in recent history... until next week.

But speaking of 2016, I remember a large number of people (including Hillary) saying that Hillary "really won" because she had more votes than Trump did, as if the Electoral College was not a thing. I recall seeing it, here on HN, over and over, for months, that Trump wasn't "really the legitimate president".

No, nobody actually tried to do anything. Obama didn't tell states to send fake electors to the House for the vote. He didn't have a "demonstration of love and respect" or whatever Trump is currently trying to paint January 6th as. So that's better. Months of talk is better than 60 court cases, fake electors, and attempting to physically prevent the vote in the House.

Since you seem to keep mis-reading me, I'm going to say that again, more clearly: The two are not comparable.

And yet... the "it's not legitimate because our person lost" was still there as a definite idea. The idea wasn't election fraud - it was that the Electoral College had thwarted the will of the people, and therefore the election was somehow illegitimate. Never mind that we had rules in place, and we followed the rules, and under the rules that were in place, Hillary lost. But no, "it's not legitimate".

Nobody ever took it as far as Trump did. But both sides de-ligitimatize the other side's victories, if only verbally. (Again, "only verbally" is better than attacking the Capitol. But it's not as close to "we'll see you in four years" as I would wish.)


Notice the Cheneys and John Boltons of the world also have seemed to flipped with them.


I am happy to say, I've never been on the side of a Cheney. Go me!


I find that unlikely. They are very publicly voting D this round. So that implies you are voting R, but that means you likely voted R with Bush. Did you vote against Bush but for Trump?


Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split, and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone got on board.

There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough' around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500 companies and workers support the democrats, based on donation numbers)

For me the big national issue has always been a refusal to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones, including some escalations, but I'm not a radical pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about threats and I don't care about targeted military intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their guns and go!


This is a wild amount of both-sidesing in a case where one side has evidence and the other is literally an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at a scale where you could not keep the secret.

Most secure in history is (in my state) is correct. There are more pointless safeguards than have ever existed. If you were willing to go with the results of any election pre 2020 then you should be overjoyed at how much more "secure" the process is. That's the point that's being made, the amount of provable voter fraud that bypasses the checks and is only discovered after the fact is nil

The article you cited is literally the system working. There's 11 million people in Ohio, the number of illegal registrations is several orders of magnitude less than the lizardman constant and they were nonetheless caught.


Including the safeguards where observers are safely kept away from the counting! There were a lot of irregularities in 2020. The supreme Court recently said Pennsylvania should not have counted some of the ballots it did in 2020 (policy change by secretary of state vs legislature).


>There were a lot of irregularities in 2020.

Source? I thought all the election fraud lawsuits/investigations for the 2020 election basically went nowhere?


For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes. Courts aren't going to question a presidential election. That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various ballot drops etc.

Opinions aren't formed on court cases. That's why in 2020, more than half of Democrats thought the election was irregular. It's remarkable to me because this is one of those issues where polling says voters of both parties agree, but the media insists that there's nothing there. That's crazy


>For lack of standing or lack of ability to relieve yes. Courts aren't going to question a presidential election.

???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

>That doesn't mean we can't look at the videos of observers being banned, the facts of now-declared-illegal extra-legislative policy changes, the timings of various ballot drops etc.

My impression is that there were a bunch of "this seems sus" allegations, but all the popular ones have been discredited. What are the most credible examples (ie. of actual malfeasance going on, rather than merely "this seems sus") that you can provide?


Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work.

The accusations are always vague as well since each time you zoom in on one it’s completely anodyne but you need the distance to keep up the specter of something nefarious.


I guess for me personally I don't deny that Joe Biden won the contest as performed. I just question the contest themselves. After all, if made up my own election law and ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in Pennsylvania.


> that's what happened here

What precisely happened here? Can you specify which ruling you’re talking about and why you think it’s so significant?


I am going to take a guess as to what the GP was referring to: In 2020, Pennsylvania was one of the states that made many changes to how their elections work under the guise of the pandemic. But they changed their rules at the last minute once more in a way that may have altered Pennsylvania’s outcomes.

Existing state law meant ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. The Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to extend that deadline and the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court (not SCOTUS) made a highly controversial ruling that extended the deadline to the following Friday. This extension would have helped Biden (given his party filed the lawsuit to force the change), and given they barely won the state (Biden had 50.01%), there is a good chance it affected the outcome.


Are you referring to Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar over the 3 day extension of the received date? Those ballots were collected separately but there were less than 10k of them so even if they’d been 100% Biden voters they wouldn’t have affected the outcome of a race which Biden won by 80k votes.


I am referring to a case filed by the Democratic party of Pennsylvania (not republicans), and I don’t recall the numbers off the top of my head but when it was in the news it was expected that the case would affect a few million votes from mail in ballots that had not yet been returned. Mail in ballots were mostly requested by Democratic voters. The ruling also had some other changes that I can’t recall. Also I forgot to mention that state supreme court deciding the case had a Democratic supermajority.

To me this situation felt like a manipulation of the election process that is outside of the norms, especially for it to happen so late. That was a few years ago but it is an example situation that causes many to still feel the election was “stolen”. I think lots of people use that term to also include actions that are technically legal but feel unfair.


Try to find a reference. The date component makes it sound like Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar, whose decision lead to both the case I mentioned and SCOTUS requiring such ballots to be held separately so they could be removed based on the decision of that case. The major discrepancy is that you’re talking millions and that only affected thousands.


Yeah, and if you look at my comments, I agree that Biden won the race as run. I just question the entire legitimacy of counting any of the votes in a rogue election. I don't think rogue elections should happen. The moral hazard is too great, and it's a direct attack on democratic processes.


Yes, my point is that “rogue election” as a term is using the language of deniers. Every election has mistakes, and the pandemic especially created novel challenges, but that’s a strong term to use if the best you can say is that a statistically insignificant number of ballots were challenged with no evidence of misconduct.


Mistakes sure. This was intentionally done though.

It's a strong term but there is no denial. I'm not even sure why people are so against calling out the obvious. Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest


What was intentionally done? Every election has ballots received late but that’s almost always human error, not someone trying to cheat, and in this case there’s been no evidence of that despite a massive effort looking for anything amiss.

> Biden probably would have won a legitimate contest

That’s why you’re getting pushback: he did a legitimate contest. The language you’ve been using has implied otherwise, which is implicitly throwing in with the convicted fraudsters.


> there is a good chance it affected the outcome

Of the state? Maybe. Of the election? No. Biden won 306 to 232 [1]. Pennsylvania only has 19 EVs. It wasn’t the tipping-point state.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...


I meant the state, although a sister comment to yours (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032946) claims the affected number of ballots was too small (which doesn’t match my recollection but sharing it here for balance). Regardless - although I am open to the possibility of various issues or flaws in various states adding up to something more, I personally am confident Biden won the election, for what it’s worth. I do have my doubts about the overall process though - voting is just the very end step, but there are things that happen before that can skew election results (media bias, social media censorship, whatever).


It might just be the neuro-spicy in me but Pennsylvania seems morally in the right here even when the courts ruled against them. The rules as set are really dumb and Pennsylvania was counting valid unambiguous ballots. The election as run was to me better than the one following the letter. How shitty would it be to have your vote thrown out because you didn't put it in the special double envelope that's for preserving your anonymity— the state doesn't give a shit if the ballot is anonymous when counting.

I get that this is a privileged take because broadly speaking the more people vote overall the better Democrats do but it's really hard to fault throwing out fewer ballots. Like turnout is already so low and a person took the time to make their voice heard. People already feel like their vote doesn't matter, dqs for arbitrary reasons aren't helping.


I mean I guess it's a viewpoint on who ought to set the rules. I actually don't even disagree with you, and I'm a sworn Republican. However, the moral hazard and threat to democracy of bureaucrat and officials overriding legislative policy is something I dislike basically universally, especially for elections


>After all, if made up my own election law and ran an election, and declared my candidate the winner, no one would listen to me, but that's what happened here, which we know based on scotus's interpretation of whether secretaries of state can change rules the way they did in Pennsylvania.

1. what happened in Pennsylvania?

2. why did a SCOTUS with 6-3 majority of republicans decide to side with Biden, of all people?

3. you haven't answered my previous question. what specific "irregularities" lead to you to not believe the official election results?


Honestly, your line of questioning is a non-sequitur, because I don't question the election results. I question the election itself. There is no doubt in my mind that Joe Biden had enough votes in the contest as run. I just think the contest is not a legal election since they didn't follow the law.

As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules, and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate election, the law has to be followed.

Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread bipartisan belief that the election was irregular. I'm honestly shocked at how different the mainstream media views are from the everyday person you talk to.


>As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules, and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate election, the law has to be followed.

>Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread bipartisan belief that the election was irregular.

The implication here seems to be that because the election was "irregular", that it wasn't legitimate. But what does "irregular" mean, and should the irregularities be the basis for overturning/ignoring the results of the election? For instance, the election happened in a pandemic. That's arguably pretty "irregular", and probably had a material impact on the results. Should the results be tossed on the basis of that alone? In other comments you mentioned other objections, like counting votes that turned up late, but it's not clear that tossing out those votes would make the election more legitimate. What's more irregular, sticking to the letter of the law exactly, and letting all the pandemic disruptions affect campaigning/turnout, or adding accommodations?


The irregularity is not following the written law when conducting the election and instead making up rules.

These were not mistakes. The secretaries of state announced that they were going to ignore election law. That should not be tolerated. It's an attack on democracy of the highest order.


> Yeah it’s just a polite retelling of the crazy Trump nonsense that was laughed out of court by every judge who looked at it and the rest is just misunderstandings from casual election observers who refuse to do one iota of research about how things work.

The majority of the cases relating to that election were dismissed for various technicalities, not on merit. As in the judges didn’t laugh them out of the court based on the ideas in those cases. Of course they may have also been rejected on merits but we won’t know.


I think it’s worth remembering that Trump’s AG, campaign, and RNC lawyers were all clear that he lost fairly. The cases he brought trying to overturn the results were most commonly rejected not on technicalities but because he couldn’t show evidence of a wrong, and were often dismissed with prejudice and in a surprising number of cases the possibility of penalties for frivolous lawsuits which you just don’t tend to see at that level because the national players have not historically been trawling for anything they could possibly use.

There’s a good list here, and it makes it clear that these cases were simply not going anywhere. The rulings aren’t technicalities like “you filed at 12:01 and the deadline was 11:59” but the failure to provide evidence of a problem even occurring in real life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...


Cases dismissed for “technicalities” means they were just dismissed… administering law is a technical process, and while I know what you’re attempting to convey with that phrasing, it’s still abundantly clear that there was no evidence at all of anything untoward or election-changing happening in 2020. So much so that several of trumps lawyers were sanctioned for filing such frivolous nonsense and others were sued for millions of dollars for their defamatory proclamations and conspiracy theories.


Junk mail democracy is the most insecure model for an election I could possibly conceive. Other than entrusting closed source software companies with tabulating votes.